The rapidly changing nature of the workplace and the composition of the current generation of students call for new paradigms for delivering business education. Teaching, once largely a teacher-centered, product-based activity, is becoming increasingly student centered and process based. However, this approach raises significant problems for students, faculty members, clients, and institutions. The authors use an example of an interdisciplinary exercise in which students from both marketing and entrepreneurship courses were paired to develop marketing plans for small-business owners. Students derived significant benefits from this process-focused experience, such as development of skills in creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, and so on. The authors highlight issues that must be addressed and a range of solutions in order to facilitate this paradigm shift in ways that benefit all of those involved.

Mixed results regarding the role of gender in moral reasoning prompted an investigation of an alternative characteristic that may be more influential in the process: sex role orientation. We present an empirical assessment of the relationship between an individual's moral reasoning level and his/her sex role orientation, gender, and several academic factors. Our results indicate that sex role orientation is not related to moral reasoning level. Gender is related to moral reasoning in our study, women reasoning at higher levels than men. We found a positive relationship between education and moral reasoning level, and moral reasoning levels differed across academic institutions. Our results also show business students have lower moral reasoning levels than students in other fields, although this result did not reach statistical significance.

The skills that develop competence in a particular area are often the same skills needed to evaluate competence in that area. When people are unable to judge their own achievement, they are in a double bind; they have neither a particular skill nor the cognitive ability to realize their own level of incompetence. If students are unaware of their poor performance on tests, they are unlikely to realize their limitations. Correspondingly, the high performers may not recognize their ability to be successful. This study tests students’ self-recognized competence by having them estimate the grade they expected to receive on a test immediately following its completion. Poorer students significantly overestimated their performance; better students underestimated their performance. Poorer students became better estimators over time, while there was no similar improvement in better students’ self-assessments.

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