Business runs on conversation. So should business school.
Your graduates will be judged in pitches, negotiations, and client rooms — not in essays. Prova conducts case defenses and professional role-plays with every student, and grades them against your rubric.
Taught in discussion, graded in documents
The case method's premise is that business judgment develops through argument — defending a position under pressure, adapting when challenged. Yet most of the actual grade in a business course rides on written deliverables: analyses, memos, group reports. AI now writes all of those fluently, which means the graded portion of the program measures less every semester.
The spoken portion, meanwhile, was always under-measured. Cold-calling reaches a few students per class. Participation grades are impressionistic — awarded to the confident, missed for the thoughtful-but-quiet. Group presentations assess one rehearsed slice, with the strongest speaker fronting for the team.
Prova fixes both halves at once: it verifies the thinking behind written work, and it makes spoken performance — the thing business school is actually for — individually and consistently assessable.
Four formats business faculty run with Prova
Every student, cold-called
Each student defends their case analysis individually — framing, assumptions, recommendation — against follow-ups that challenge it the way the room would.
Negotiations & client scenarios
Prova plays the counterpart — skeptical client, tough negotiator, struggling direct report — and evaluates both execution and framework use, with a transcript for debrief.
Finance to strategy
Students reason aloud through valuation logic, market entry trade-offs, or accounting mechanics — verifying they can use the frameworks, not just define them.
Group work, individually verified
Every member defends the team deliverable separately. The chronic free-rider problem in group projects finally has a measurement instrument.
Assessment that doubles as training
Every hiring step your students face — case interviews, behavioral rounds, partner conversations — is an oral exam. Programs that assess through spoken performance aren't just protecting grade integrity; they're giving students dozens of reps at the exact skill their placement outcomes depend on. Career services teams tend to become Prova's biggest internal advocates for precisely this reason.
And because sessions are asynchronous and concurrent, this works at the scale business programs operate: a 600-student core course can run individual case defenses in a week, with faculty reviewing structured evaluations instead of scheduling six hundred conversations.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do business schools use oral assessment?
Business education is already built on spoken performance — case discussions, pitches, negotiations, client conversations. Prova makes those formats assessable at scale: it conducts case defenses, role-plays, and concept orals with every student individually, and returns rubric-aligned evaluations with transcripts, so the skills programs claim to teach are the skills they actually measure.
What does a role-play with Prova look like?
Prova plays the counterpart — a skeptical client, a negotiation partner, an employee in a difficult conversation — while the student navigates the scenario in real time. The evaluation covers both the interpersonal execution and the underlying frameworks, against the rubric you define.
Can it assess case analysis without cold-calling?
Yes. Cold-calling samples a handful of students per session; a Prova case discussion examines everyone. Each student defends their analysis of the case — their framing, assumptions, and recommendation — with follow-ups that press on the weak points, the way a good discussion leader would.
Is this relevant for online MBA programs?
Especially so. Online MBAs lean heavily on discussion boards and written deliverables — the formats most compromised by AI. Asynchronous spoken assessment restores individual verification and participation depth without adding synchronous sessions across time zones.
How do students react to AI role-plays?
Practice conversations are among the most requested and best-reviewed uses. Students get unlimited low-stakes reps at pitches, negotiations, and hard conversations before doing them live — the kind of deliberate practice that used to require a willing classmate or an expensive coach.