Within and across several disciplines in higher education, there is a broad consensus that students should acquire competencies and that these competencies should be assessed by reliable and valid measuring instruments. However, the actual modeling and measurement of competencies is still largely neglected in the German higher education sector. As long as the underlying concept of competence is not exactly defined, taking into account heterogeneous curricula, and as long as no suitable measurement methods exist, the accomplishments might not exceed a mere “rhetoric of competence”. This is particularly true in the disciplines of business and economics. Even though they are the most popular subjects of study among beginning and advanced students (Federal Statistical Office, 2012), there is no available German-language instrument that meets academic requirements for the assessment of (professional) business and economic competence (Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia & Kuhn, 2011). Previous approaches have either focused on target groups outside of higher education or have conceptualized and operationalized professional business and economic competence in a different way (Nickolaus, 2011).

Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the project WiwiKom strives to remedy this research deficit by pursuing the two goals of modeling and instrument design in an iterative way. One goal consists in developing a competence model for students in business and economics that is valid with respect to content and curricula, and is based on an understanding of competence as the latent cognitive underpinning of performance. In the first instance, this model is to narrow down the object of study in line with research pragmatism, and it is to comprise basic contents of the curricular sub-domains of business and economics (e.g. accounting, marketing, and management). Furthermore, the domain-specific competence ought to take into account both job-related and curricular aspects that play a role in specific situations of decision-making in the domains mentioned above. The other goal consists in adapting international assessment instruments and merging them into one German instrument so that the theoretically postulated competence structures and levels become empirically measurable as incremental occurrences of professional business and economic competence.

To address the multiple challenges in the project WiwiKom, the Chair of Business Education has associated with the Faculty of Translation Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and with the Chair for Statistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. This interdisciplinary team has set itself to adapt and validate nationally two key instruments: the Spanish-language test “Examen General para el Egreso de la Licenciatura en Administración“ (EGEL) by the Mexican Centro Nacional de Evaluación para la Educación Superior (CENEVAL) and the “Test of Understanding in College Economics“ (TUCE) by the U.S. Council for Economic Educations (CEE). Both are internationally approved testing instruments, both were designed for higher education, and they include both business content (EGEL) and economic content (TUCE).

Federal Statistical Office (2012). Studierende an Hochschulen – Wintersemester 2011/ 2012 [Students at Universities – Winter Term 2011/2012]. Wiesbaden, Germany: Federal Statistical Office. Frey, A., Hartig, J., & Rupp, A. A. (2009). An NCME Instructional Module on Booklet Designs in Large-Scale Assessments of Student Achievement: Theory and Practice. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 28(3), 39-53. Nickolaus, R. (2011). Kompetenzmessung und Prüfungen in der beruflichen Bildung [Competence Assessment and Exams in Vocational Education]. Zeitschrift für Berufs- und Wirtschaftspädagogik, 107(2), 161-173. Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, O., & Kuhn, C. (2011). Assessment of Competencies among University Students and Graduates – Analyzing the State of Research and Perspectives. In K. Beck, K. Breuer, & O. Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia, (Eds.), Arbeitspapiere Wirtschaftspädagogik, 59. Mainz, Germany: Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftspädagogik, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität.