You are Dr Refilwe Mahlangu, MBA programme director at Highveld School of Business in Pretoria. External moderators have just flagged the programme's flagship course, and the assessment scheme they flagged is one you designed. You have eight weeks to bring back a redesign, and the first thing is to decide where individual accountability went missing.
The situation
It is a Tuesday in February 2026. "Managing for Results" sits at the centre of the MBA: about 280 students a cohort, several sections and several convenors, and its results serve as accreditation evidence for the whole degree. 70% of each student's grade comes from one final group project. The moderators' report is short: in that grade they can find no evidence of what any one person has learned. Without a redesign in eight weeks, the course's accredited credits move to "under review".
The usual figures look fine: 88% pass and 92% complete, and the school uses them in its marketing. But in an anonymous survey, 41% say they carried a teammate's share or were carried. The school collects peer evaluations every term and has never used them in a grade; checked against independent markers, they explain only about 8% of the real differences in what each student knows.
A pilot section has already tried a quick fix: it moved 60% of the grade onto a single final individual exam, and completion fell from 92% to 74% within a term. You have about 600 hours of marking and support per cohort and a fund of ZAR 1.6 million, both fixed. Highveld sells its MBA on one promise: graduates who can be held accountable, one by one, for results. Four years ago, as convenor, you argued that a management course should be assessed the way management is done: in teams.