How Can AI Support Your Accreditation Efforts?

• Tools such as ChatGPT can quickly generate data that business school administrators can use to ensure that course content aligns with accreditation standards.
• Schools can ask GenAI chatbots to analyze faculty’s mission-based activities and produce reporting data that, once checked for errors, can be submitted with accreditation documents as evidence of impact.
• Educators can train GenAI platforms to generate tailored, thought-provoking assignments and rubrics in ways that save faculty time and enhance student learning.

 
When it comes to pursuing accreditation, no two business schools are alike. Each has its own strengths, faculty portfolios, student populations, and missions. However, all schools—whether they are in the initial or later stages of their accreditation journeys—have one thing in common: They are looking for ways to streamline a complex and time-consuming process.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools could offer an invaluable solution, according to the presenters at a recent AACSB webinar. “Practical AI Applications for Accreditation,” held in August, highlighted two ways that educators can use chatbots such as ChatGPT to simplify their accreditation reporting and assessment efforts in significant ways.

During the webinar, Anca Micu, senior associate dean and professor of marketing at Fairfield University in Connecticut, shared how the Dolan School of Business uses ChatGPT to assist in AACSB accreditation reporting. Next, Tawnya Means, assistant dean of educational innovation and chief learning officer at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, shared how she uses GenAI to customize assignments and assessments in her courses.

Gather Relevant Documents

According to Micu, educators can use ChatGPT (available in free and premium versions) to more quickly organize and analyze data for their accreditation reporting. To start, educators should gather all relevant documentation. This includes spreadsheets of the class schedule (including course names and codes, education levels, terms, disciplines, and instructors) and a list of AACSB qualification statuses for each professor.

Educators also should create two documents: one listing faculty’s curriculum vitas and one containing faculty’s annual activity reports (cut and pasted from emails or downloaded from the school’s preferred data collection software).

They now can upload this information to ChatGPT and ask the chatbot for help with a range of critical accreditation tasks.

Train the Chatbot, Check for Errors

No matter how educators use ChatGPT or other AI platforms, Micu stressed, they always must check AI’s responses for “hallucinations”—errors or omissions that GenAI presents as factual. As part of this process, educators should “teach” the platform how to use the spreadsheet by asking questions for which they already know the answers.

When the chatbot falters, she advised, they can point out the error and tell the platform to try again. In Micu’s example, she tested ChatGPT by asking it to use the course schedule she had uploaded to calculate the percentage of courses one professor had taught—ChatGPT initially responded that the professor had taught no courses that term. Knowing that to be untrue, Micu corrected the platform, and it came back with an accurate response.

ChatGPT will always sound very professional and certain, Micu emphasized. But given the possibility of errors, those using AI to generate reporting data should have general knowledge about the school’s faculty and programs, so that any AI hallucinations will stand out.

Use No. 1: Calculating Course Coverage

Schools can use ChatGPT to determine more quickly whether they have achieved adequate teaching coverage for their courses, under Standard 3 of AACSB’s accreditation standards. After uploading a spreadsheet of class schedule information to ChatGPT, Micu noted, administrators can write prompts to generate different types of information. For example, they might craft a prompt such as the following: “Using the class schedule that I just uploaded, compute and list the percentage of classes in a particular discipline.”

Administrators also can ask the chatbot to calculate how many courses are taught by full-time Scholarly Academics (SAs), versus visiting faculty or adjuncts. After uploading the document that lists each faculty member’s qualification status, they can ask ChatGPT to add a column with those qualifications to its previous calculations.

Administrators can use GenAI’s output to determine their next course of action—whether to offer fewer but larger classes, ask tenure-track faculty to teach an overload, or hire an additional tenure-track academic.

“Now we have the full schedule plus the qualifications and the participation status,” Micu said. “We are ready to ask it to compute coverage.” This will make it clear whether the school has met AACSB accreditation’s faculty coverage targets, as defined under Standard 3.

Accreditation managers can use a similar process to determine whether future courses will meet faculty targets. If the data show discrepancies, they can ask ChatGPT to calculate how many classes must be switched from being taught by instructional practitioners to SAs or how many SA-taught sections could be added to meet accreditation guidelines.

This output can provide insights that help adminsitrators determine their next course of action—whether to offer fewer but larger classes, ask tenure-track faculty to teach an overload, or hire an additional tenure-track academic.

Use No. 2: Summarizing Faculty Publications

Next, schools can use GenAI to determine whether they have a sufficient ratio of SAs in their faculty. This requires that they gather faculty vitas, end-of-year faculty activity reports (in essay format), and their schools’ preferred journal ranking lists into a single Word document.

After uploading this document to ChatGPT, they can ask it to generate lists that outline a range of information—all journal publications, publication outlets, conferences, or other categories of faculty achievements, for example. Or, they can ask the platform to group publications by discipline, by faculty member, or other categorization. This output can be included in the documentation for AACSB accreditation reporting. 

Use No. 3: Summarizing Mission-Focused Activities

For her final point, Micu advised attendees to gather into one document emails or end-of-year reports from faculty that highlight their mission-based activities. After uploading that document into ChatGPT, administrators can write prompts that ask the chatbot to generate an overall summary. Or they can ask the platform to focus only on certain activities, such as community service, student internships, job placements, or other relevant areas.

“In the case of Fairfield, we are a Jesuit school, so the prompt we use asks what has been done in support of the school’s Jesuit mission,” Micu said. Schools can ask ChatGPT to output the information in different formats—for example, as a list that highlights what each faculty member has done or as a paragraph-based narrative that summarizes faculty collective activity.

“It is truly critical to check ChatGPT and ask for additional prompts refining what you are looking for before taking the answer as a ‘good answer,’” Micu concluded. “Asking ChatGPT to keep refining will actually teach it about the documents that you have uploaded, and it will make it give you the correct answers. The more you ask, the better those answers will be.”

Use No. 4: Supporting Assurance of Learning

In her presentation, Means focused on how AI can be used to enhance students’ learning by “making sure that we’re able to get those deeper insights into their performance” and “that our curriculum and processes … are aligned with the standards.”

Educators can use GenAI tools to align curricula across courses, automate analyses to find patterns in student work, and generate reports that support data-driven decision-making. Such tools also help educators maintain academic rigor, protect academic integrity, and generate personalized and immediate feedback to students.

“When we think about an instructor coming up with 10 different scenarios, that’s a lot of work. But if we think about generative AI coming up with 10 or even 100 different scenarios, that’s not so much work.”

With these objectives in mind, Means walked attendees through five ways to use GenAI to improve course design and enhance student learning:

Write customized questions. Educators can prompt GenAI to generate complex, thought-provoking, and unexpected questions that encourage students to engage more deeply with course materials and tap into higher-order thinking.

“When we think about an instructor coming up with 10 different scenarios, that’s a lot of work,” Means pointed out. “But if we think about Generative AI coming up with 10 or even 100 different scenarios, that’s not so much work.”

Moreover, GenAI can tailor these scenarios to course materials and even to students’ individual proficiency levels, knowledge, and interests. In this way, faculty can assign more challenging tasks to students who are farther ahead, while offering additional help and resources to students who are struggling. Such personalization can be especially valuable in large courses, Means noted.

Protect academic integrity. Means also invited attendees to think about the “unending test bank that you can create—you can ask the Generative AI tool to create a variety of different ways to ask a question.” This allows educators to create unique data sets so that students can each work on a problem in a different way. Because students are working on their own questions, they’re less likely to share answers, which supports academic integrity. “If they’re talking to each other,” she said, “it’s more likely that they’re focusing on what they want to learn.”

Provide instant feedback. A chatbot can be integrated into a learning management system or used as a standalone tool to provide immediate “specific, actionable feedback” based on the assignment. Students can apply that information as they continue to work on the assignment with the necessary adjustments already made.

Enhance peer review. AI can create guidelines that help students improve their peer review skills, or it can serve as a “peer reviewer” that provides feedback as if it were a student in the course.

Create assignments and rubrics. Means spent extra time on how to use GenAI tools to create assignments aligned with learning outcomes, create rubrics for assessment, and evaluate student responses. With GenAI, faculty can complete these typically time-consuming aspects of course design with far less effort.

Means walked attendees through her own process of asking the chatbot to generate an assignment and rubric for a graduate strategic management capstone course. In her prompt, she specified that the rubric should generate assessment data appropriate for AACSB accreditation purposes. (Means also shared the log of her conversation with ChatGPT.)

Means asked ChatGPT to adopt the role of a learning assessment expert to create an assignment that requires students to conduct analyses, apply specific frameworks, and implement certain strategic initiatives. She then asked the chatbot to create a detailed scoring rubric that determines whether students exceeded, met, or did not meet course expectations.

Finally, she asked ChatGPT to write instructions that she could give students for the assignment, including deliverables. The chatbot also generated a rubric that includes feedback that could be provided to students; guidelines for using the rubric to meet course learning objectives; and recommendations of ways that the resulting assessment data could be analyzed to support continuous improvement.

Means pointed out that if at any point educators find the chatbot’s responses insufficient, they can ask it to provide more detail in certain areas.

Exploring What’s Possible With AI

AACSB will continue to discuss GenAI’s potential in the accreditation process at its upcoming Americas Accreditation Conference to be held in Denver September 30 to October 1. Micu and Means each will present separate sessions at the conference, where they will cover additional uses for the technology for AACSB reporting and classroom assessment.

Other conference sessions will delve more deeply into how schools can use the technology to streamline data analysis, support societal impact aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and enable innovation. The association also will offer attendees a first look at its new accreditation GPT tool.

Stephanie Bryant, chief accreditation officer for AACSB and webinar moderator, noted that both the association and business schools are still early in their shared journey of testing the ways that AI can assist in the accreditation process. “We’re currently focused on further discovering the best practices in GenAI,” Bryant said. “We’re sharing them with you as we’re all learning together.”