Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators

Synthesis: Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators — The paper argues that Assessment and grading are among the most influential factors shaping learning in Higher Education, yet traditional, summative-heavy and norm-referenced approaches undermine deep learning, well-being, equity, and academic integrity in the generative AI era. Synthesizing the wider higher-education literature, it identifies five innovative practices aligned with the "assessment for learning" (Formative Assessment) paradigm — authentic assessment, self- and Peer Assessment, reassessment, standards-based grading, and ungrading — and reviews their uptake across 58 articles from four leading management education journals. It finds self- and peer-assessment dominate that discourse while the other practices remain marginal, and urges management educators to engage more actively and reciprocally with assessment and grading innovation.

Key Findings

• Assessment and grading are under-researched in management education. Only 58 assessment-related articles appeared over 20 years across AMLE, JME, Management Learning, and IJME (roughly three per year), many concentrated in 2010 and 2014 special issues — a modest footprint given assessment's central role in shaping learning.
• Traditional practices are critiqued on multiple fronts. Conventional, summative, norm-referenced grading encourages superficial, fragmented learning; provides students little control or transparency; harms intrinsic Motivation; fuels stress and anxiety; and perpetuates inequities — while largely assessing recall rather than real-world application.
• The guiding vision is "assessment for learning." Drawing on Sambell et al., the authors frame formative, ongoing, and individualized Feedback as an overarching philosophy rather than a toolkit, balancing formative with summative purposes and foregrounding student agency, self-regulation, and metacognitive skill.
• Five innovative practices are proposed as mutually reinforcing. The selected set integrates assessment-focused innovations (authentic assessment, self- and peer-assessment, reassessment) with grading-focused ones (standards-based grading and ungrading), chosen for pedagogical validity, strategic relevance to current challenges, practical feasibility, and complementarity.
• Uptake is highly uneven in management education. Self- and peer-assessment are extensively studied and used (nearly half the reviewed corpus), chiefly for summative evaluation of group work; authentic assessment appears mainly via technology-mediated simulations and is often conflated with experiential learning; while reassessment, standards-based grading, and ungrading are virtually absent.
• The gap is partly a matter of language and culture. Many management educators already use experiential and team-based activities that overlap with authentic assessment, but without that terminology; meanwhile norm-referenced "grading on a curve," external signaling (rankings, internships, accreditation), and students' instrumental mindset create normative barriers to mastery-oriented and gradeless approaches.
• Authentic assessment is especially well-suited to management education. Tasks mirroring real professional problems (live consulting projects, dashboards with executive briefings) align with the field's practice-oriented, employability focus and can support inclusive, integrity-preserving alternatives to exam-centered assessment in the GenAI era.
• Implementation demands institutional and cultural support. Change is resisted by instructors and students alike; the authors recommend incremental experimentation (e.g., ungraded assignments, reassessment for a single task, standards-based standards-based rubrics), program-level coordination, documented Scholarship of Teaching and Learning evidence, and dialogue spanning validity, assurance of learning, and stakeholders such as accreditation bodies and employers.

What this means for practice

• Instructors. Start with a single low-stakes change rather than a grading overhaul: one ungraded assignment, reassessment for one task, or one standards-based rubric — the incremental moves the authors present as feasible entry points.
• Instructors. Redesign one assignment around a real professional product, such as a live consulting deliverable or a dashboard with an executive briefing. Management educators already run experiential and team-based activities that map onto authentic assessment without using the term.
• Faculty developers. Convene program-level conversations that connect assessment redesign to validity, assurance of learning, accreditation, and employer signaling, because the barriers the review documents — curving, rankings, internships, students' instrumental mindset — are institutional rather than individual.
• Curriculum designers. Coordinate standards-based rubrics and reassessment opportunities across a program rather than within single courses, so students meet consistent criteria as they build assessment literacy over time.

Limitations

• Uptake claims rest on 58 assessment-related articles from four journals (AMLE, JME, Management Learning, and IJME) published since 2005 — roughly three per year — and 18 of those appeared in two special issues (2010 and 2014), so the corpus is small and clustered.
• Uptake was tracked through terminology: the authors note that management educators may already practice authentic assessment under labels such as experiential learning, so the absence of a term can understate actual use.
• This is a literature review with no new student or classroom data; evidence for the five practices' benefits comes from scholarship largely outside management education, and within the corpus ungrading appears in exactly one article (Kjaergaard et al., 2023) while standards-based, mastery-based, and competency-based grading are referenced by none.
• The five practices were selected on the authors' own criteria — pedagogical validity, strategic relevance, feasibility, and complementarity — rather than derived systematically, so the set is a curated judgment rather than a complete map of the field.

Citation

Mesny, A., Roberge-Maltais, I., & Galy, A. (2026). Innovative assessment and grading practices in higher education: A critical exploration for management educators. The International Journal of Management Education, 24, 101307.