EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
$2 million for Mandrake Bio, a venture that is developing programmable gene-editing enzymes using generative AI. The question now is no longer simply whether students were given an experience, it’s whether the experience produced enough evidence to tell us something meaningful about how they think. The harder problem is assessment: if merit no longer equates to a single score, something else must be measurable in its place. Once an institution tries to develop judgement, rather than comprehension, the business plan, the slide deck and the write-up stop being reliable evidence of progress. While they show what a student can construct under no real pressure, they say comparatively little about what that student would do in practice. Grading what happened, not what was submitted Once a venture has real money in it, the more useful question is how the decisions behind it were made. Did the team test its assumptions before committing resources, or discover flaws the expensive way? How did they respond when evidence contradicted the plan they had prepared for a class? A venture that fails quickly after exposing a flawed assumption offers better learning than one that stumbles into short‑term success. Revenue, conversion and retention are not proxies for learning in themselves; they become evidence only once someone is interpreting them for the quality of the decision‑making behind them. The number itself is never the grade. That makes this a more demanding form of assessment than a written examination. Faculty have to reconstruct a chain of reasoning rather than marking responses against an answer key or booklet. Students must account for decisions rather than simply reproduce information. Failure, meanwhile, needs to be treated as data rather than automatically counting as a mark against; something that sits uneasily with institutions built to reward correct answers. This is not a peripheral concern, as several international accreditation bodies have moved steadily towards documenting learner competencies over content coverage. This suggests that those responsible for quality assurance in management education have reached their own version of the same conclusion: that demonstrating graduates’ capabilities now carries more evidentiary weight
than what they were taught. AI is adding urgency to this shift, since it can generate a competent-looking analysis in minutes but cannot take responsibility for the decision it is meant to support. The credential that travels None of this is intended to be an argument against the value of academic rigour. A student cannot interpret a failed negotiation without negotiation theory, or read a customer’s behaviour without some grounding in marketing. Conceptual foundations remain the precondition for good judgement. What has changed, however, is what we should trust to demonstrate that judgement, at a time when a market that has spent generations optimising for one kind of credential is being asked, rather suddenly, to produce evidence of another. A scorecard offers a statement of what a student was taught and a machine can now produce this easily. What stands to travel further, therefore, is a credible account of someone’s decision-making when a supplier disappeared, a campaign failed to convert, or an investor asked a question the plan had not anticipated. In a market that has been so attached to the score, rethinking merit is not a small undertaking. Taking merit seriously requires building an institution around evidence of what a graduate can really do, instead of what they can write down under exam conditions. Fundamentally, that is what a score was always meant to measure.
MASTERS’ UNION
Abhinav Arora is an associate director at Masters’ Union in Gurugram, India, where he conducts career-focused learning and mentoring sessions and leads the school’s accreditation and alumni relations functions. He holds an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies – University of Delhi and has more than 15 years’ experience across EY-Parthenon, PwC, Reliance Jio and Nokia Mansi Bhargava is a senior manager at Masters’ Union, where she conducts marketing-focused learning and mentoring sessions and heads the school’s marketing domain. She holds an MBA from IIM Ranchi and brings experience across strategy, operations and brand building
Business Impact • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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