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In 2020 AACSB introduced a new revision to the language in its 2020 Business Accreditation Standards. In response, Watermark embarked on a joint effort shared by its Product, Engineering, Marketing and Client Success teams to ensure that Faculty Success AACSB reports now accurately reflect these changes.
AACSB's compliance date for the new tables is July 1, 2023.
This article covers what's changed since the last iteration of AACSB reports and the screen revisions required to ensure the new reports work properly.
Overall Changes
Grouping Faculty
AACSB introduced a new structure for grouping faculty members as part of the 2020 standards. Instead of grouping faculty based on their departments, AACSB is requiring grouping to be based on discipline.
In addition to the change in grouping, AACSB is including the faculty’s specialty in the new Table 3-1. This specialty should match the reported specialty for that faculty member in AACSB’s salary survey.
Renaming Tables
Table 2-1 has been renamed to Table 8-1, and Table 2-2 has been removed. Table 15-1 has been renamed to Table 3-1, and Table 15-2 is now Table 3-2.
Changes to Table 8-1: Intellectual Contributions
AACSB consolidated the “Types of Intellectual Contributions” section of the table to be three columns:
- Peer-reviewed journal articles
- Additional peer- or editorial-reviewed intellectual contributions
- All other intellectual contributions
The intent of this consolidation is to simplify the data categorization and reporting to emphasize the narratives that the table supports. The same screens and fields will be used to populate these columns; that is, the same contributions are being counted. They are simply be allocated to a different set of types.
CHANGES TO Table 3-1: Faculty Sufficiency and Qualifications Summary
Proportional Percentage of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission
In the 2020 revision AACSB confirmed that a faculty member's "Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission" should be proportional based on the number of Disciplines to which they are assigned. Per the standards:
“A faculty member teaching in more than one discipline may be listed multiple times, but the percent of time devoted to mission should be reflected proportionally in each discipline and not be more than 100 percent.”
To accommodate this, we added an option to move the "Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission" field (found on the Yearly Data screen) into a "Department" DSA to capture unit-level deployment. For instance, if a faculty member's "full" Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission is 50%, and they spend half of this time teaching in Accounting and half in Finance, their distribution would be:
- Accounting: 25% dedicated to the school's mission
- Finance: 25% dedicated to the school's mission
Given this revision, faculty may appear in the table multiple times if they belong to multiple Disciplines. However, to accurately display faculty's productivity calculations (Courses Taught or Student Credit Hours) proportionally by each Discipline, institutions with this configuration will need an additional revision to the Scheduled Teaching screen. The full process for moving to a multi-discipline configuration for Table 3-1 is as follows:
- If you've requested to split out faculty's "Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission" values by Discipline, we'll perform a data transformation to move this value inside of a Discipline DSA on your Yearly Data screen. Existing values will be migrated to the first Discipline DSA row unless otherwise specified.
- You will then need to backfill "Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's Mission" value on the Yearly Data screen in instances where faculty have more than one unit assignment.
- We will clone the Discipline drop-down list on your Yearly Data screen and place it on the Scheduled Teaching screen - labeled as "Course Discipline". This will allow you to attribute courses to their associated discipline at the section level. If you share your instrument with other units on campus, the "Course Discipline" field will be restricted to Business faculty if your "Degree Program" field is also restricted.
- You will then need to backfill your "Course Discipline" assignments for all Scheduled Teaching records using the CSV import tool. NOTE: until your Course Discipline assignments are backfilled, your 3-1 Table will not include any course records - so we recommend preparing these assignments in a CSV file before requesting this revision so you can act quickly to ensure your table stays operational throughout this re-configuration.
Note that this is NOT an automatic or mandatory revision. If your faculty are assigned to multiple disciplines and you need to capture their Percent of Time Dedicated to the School's mission at this unit level, simply submit a Screen Revision Work Request to incorporate this change in your Table 3-1.
CHANGES TO Table 3-2: Deployment of Faculty by Qualification Status in Support of Degree Programs
Degree Program Values on Scheduled Teaching
AACSB has added a potential Degree Program value for the Table 3-2 of "Research Master’s". Historically, the system will start with four "placeholder" Degree Program values on the Scheduled Teaching screen, which make up the "Program" rows in Table 3-2. Including the Research Master’s option, this placeholder list would now look like this:
- Bachelor's
- MBA
- Research Master’s
- Specialized Master's (broken out by Master’s program)
- Doctoral
AACSB has clarified that 3-2 should be broken down by any and all Degree Programs eligible for accreditation at your institution (emphasizing the need to complete this for all Master's programs, specifically).
To ensure that your Table 3-2 accurately depicts your faculty deployment for all Degree Programs, you'll need to submit a Screen Revision Work Request with a full list of values you'd like to store on your Scheduled Teaching screen. We can work with you to retrofit existing data to a new Degree Program model.
AACSB REQUIRED FIELDS AUDIT
There is also a new version of the AACSB Required Fields Audit report to account for the 2020 standards. This version will check for Discipline and AACSB Specialty on the Yearly Data screen.
ACCESSING THE 2013 V. 2018 BASE AACSB REPORT SUITE
In December 2020, we rolled the 2020 AACSB reports out to clients exclusively using our base version of the tables. These clients received a notification from our team ahead of time.
As part of deploying the 2020 reports in Production, we did not change your access to any older AACSB reports.
Screen Revisions Required by the 2020 Reports
The new reports require a handful of screen revisions in order to run properly. Please submit a Screen Revision Work Request at your convenience with the following:
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A list of Disciplines to be used to categorize your faculty for tables 3-1 and 8-1. This list will be used to add a "Discipline" field to your Yearly Data screen.
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A sub-set list of those Disciplines which should be marked as non-degree-granting on table 3-1.
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Permission to add an AACSB Specialty field to the Yearly Data screen.
You do not need to supply the options for this field - we will use this predefined list.
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Permission to rename the “Other” option to "Additional" in the AACSB Qualification field on the Yearly Data screen.
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If you need to adjust the list of Programs on your Scheduled Teaching screen, a list of those changes.
Referenced AACSB Resources
The following resources from AACSB guided us in our work, and may be useful to you as you prepare for these screen revisions and begin working with the new reports:
- AACSB's 2020 Guiding Principles and Standards for Business Accreditation
- 2020 Interpretive Guidance for AACSB Business Accreditation
- Visual crosswalk for the Tables: Business Accreditation Standards Comparison - 2020 & 2013
You can also find these resources and more from AACSB on their Business Accreditation Standards page.
Webinar Introduction to the New Reports
from January 14, 2021
