Are Australian MBAs fail-proof?

Less prestigious Australian business schools, which have to work harder to attract MBA students, are letting academic standards slip, according to an education expert – and even in the most sought-after schools, it has become the norm to give students a second chance when work is borderline.

Dr Gavin Moodie, a higher education policy adviser at RMIT University who has worked in the sector for more than 30 years, says the need for revenue may have encouraged a lowering of academic standards at less prominent, less prestigious business schools, facing lower demand for places.

The change has been filtering through the system since late 2009 when the federal government made changes to student eligibility requirements and the types of courses that would lead to permanent residency.

Moodie says that within all business schools, it has become more common to give students a 'second chance' at a subject than before the introduction of student-fee funding for universities. So, even within reputable business schools, students might be allowed extra tutoring, to re-sit an exam or re-submit an assignment, for instance, if they were within five per cent of a pass mark.

"I don't think many people would consider that a lowering of education standards, that is, giving students a second chance. It's become the norm now," says Moodie.

However, problems can occur in the so-called 'permanent residency' business schools, which have a high number of international students enrolled simply to help them qualify for immigration purposes. In those types of schools, Moodie says it's typical for lecturers to face much more pressure to pass students, not only from students but from the school itself.

"In those cases, there is a much greater risk that there will be a lowering of standards, for example, there might be marking only of a student's understanding of a topic, and not marking of their English expression… this occurs in business schools where there are a high number of international students whose main purpose is to gain residency."

In recent times, however, enrolments at such schools have dropped following a tightening of immigration laws. Whereas, before 2009, it was possible to gain permanent residency based on accumulating points for studying certain degrees, it is now attained more easily through employer sponsorship, rather than a qualification alone. This, in turn, has heightened concerns about academic standards at certain schools.

Both the Central Queensland University and the University of Ballarat, for example, have experienced a drop in enrolments since the immigration changes.

But Professor David Battersby, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ballarat, strongly disagrees with Moodie's examination, saying that the RMIT advisor's comments were erroneous.

"In our experience, gross generalisations about "soft marking” are usually evidence-free and largely driven by supposition, intuition and prejudice."

The regional Victorian university closely monitors the performance of international students, and compares them directly with the results of domestic students, Battersby says, adding that the institution's most-recent data showed no difference in the pass rates between students who study at the University of Ballarat's partner teaching locations and classes with a mixture of international and domestic students at its campus in Ballarat.

"Moreover, international students at the University's Ballarat campus perform similarly to the cohorts studying at partner locations, and in terms of fail rates, perform no worse than their domestic counterparts.

But, according to Moodie, the risk of soft marking is real and something Australia's best business schools are eternally vigilant about.

However, Paul Dainty, Deputy Dean (Academic) at Melbourne University's Business School (MBS), an institution praised by Moodie and others for its enduringly high standards, says that as far as soft marking of international or Australian students goes, "we just don't do it, as it would damage our brand. It would damage our reputation as a quality institution and it's just not the culture here.”

Dainty, who is responsible for overall academic standards at the school, says MBS has high standards about whom it will accept into its MBA course. "We are one of the few business schools in Australia that gives all of our full-time students the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test) test. Additionally, students who haven't done their previous degree in English must have completed the IELTS or the TOEFL course. Dainty won't share fail rates for individual subjects, but says few students fail their MBA overall. "In some cases like accounting, we get a relatively larger number of failing students, than say, for a softer subject like managing people... It varies from term to term but because of our strict admissions process, not many students fail their MBA overall, no more than one or two a year.”

At many institutions, however, 'failure' is not the end point of a student's studies, with is not uncommon for under-performing enrolees to be given a final reprieve.

As Guy Ford, Deputy Dean, Associate Professor of Management at Macquarie Graduate School of Management, explains students who don't reach a minimum grade point average in their program are asked to "show cause” why they should remain in the program. "If they cannot justify remaining in the program, they are exited, based on low performance,” he says.

It's a situation mirrored at many schools, including Deakin's Graduate School of Business, whose head, Ross Chapman says the 'second chance' process is part of the special attention the school pays to under-performing students. As a result "there are small numbers of students who are excluded because of poor performance,” Chapman says.

So while the jury is still out about whether MBA marking standards have been lowered, it's clear that Australia's leading institutions are aware that a problem, whether it be advanced or in its infancy, exists.

It's a development in MBA study that local prospective and current students of the program must be aware of.

As RMIT University's Moodie says: "The archetypal MBA student is an Australian resident, probably working full-time, who is studying an MBA part-time to advance their career upwards or move into a new area.

"Amongst those students, the reputation and the quality of the MBA qualification and the business school are very important. The schools that attract these students are therefore very concerned to have the best reputation they can have for their MBA programs; and the schools would be most unlikely to do anything that would affect the standards of the MBA, or its reputation, such as soft marking or the lowering of academic standards."

But with each school producing only a few failures each academic year, businesses would be best served thoroughly assessing the quality of the MBA their new hires hold.