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The aim of this paper is to respond to calls for in‐depth studies of production and operations management (OM) teaching by providing an analysis of the relative effectiveness of a continuous problem‐based assessment and a traditional final exam assessment in OM.

An undergraduate OM module is used to assess how well a problem‐based assessment method performs against a more traditional final exam in terms of impact on student learning, student classification and feasibility. Quantitative data on student performance, feedback and satisfaction are used.

The analysis shows that the problem‐based assessment provides a better learning experience for the students, but is a worse classificatory of student results than the conventional exam. In terms of feasibility, problem‐based assessment can be a cost‐effective assessment method.

This study analyses the assessment method used on one module for nine years; to increase the generalizability of the findings further research is needed with different modules and contexts.

This paper gives guidance to OM educators on how to improve assessment methods to achieve both improved learning effects as well as an accurate classification of student performance.

This study extends the literature on problem‐based learning to assessments and provides an empirical analysis of one such method. This study also provides detailed analysis of different assessment methods in OM based on longitudinal data.

The use of organizational ethnography has grown significantly during the past decades. While language is an important component of ethnographic research, the challenges associated with language barriers are rarely discussed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to open up a discussion on language barriers in organizational ethnography.

The author draws on her experience as a PhD student doing an organizational ethnography of an emergency department in a country where she initially did not speak the local language.

The paper examines the author's research process, from access negotiation to presentation of findings, illustrating the language barriers encountered doing an ethnography in parallel to learning the local language in Sweden.

This paper calls for awareness of the influence of the ethnographer's language skills and shows the importance of discussing this in relation to how we teach and learn ethnography, research practice and diversity in academia.

The paper makes three contributions to organizational ethnography. First, it contributes to the insider/outsider debate by nuancing the ethnographer's experience. Second, it answers calls for transparency by presenting a personal ethnographic account. Third, it contributes to developing the methodology by offering tips to deal with language barriers in doing ethnography abroad.