After several years working for firms such as Arthur Andersen and the Gap, accountant Devi Vallabhaneni noticed that many corporate managers struggled to understand how their own companies were run. “Everyone talks about leadership,” she thought. “But if you don’t know the fundamentals, how can you come up with a good strategy?”

So Vallabhaneni joined with her father, also a businessperson, to create something they call the Certified Business Manager exam, or CBM, a 16-hour test of business knowledge. Since the exam was first offered in 2005, some 3,000 people have become CBMs, meaning they have both passed the massive test and sworn to abide by a code of ethics.

Over a glass of water at a Manhattan Starbucks, Vallabhaneni, 38, wears a comfortable cotton dress and keeps her long black hair pulled back with a barrette. She speaks with the warmth and patience of a solicitous teacher, but one with a penchant for PowerPoint-like analysis. She inherited her faith in credentials from her father, S. Rao Vallabhaneni, a former business professor with 24 professional certifications and four masters degrees. Vallabhaneni père, who hails from India but moved his family to Illinois in the 1970s, was working on the CBM when his daughter graduated from HBS in 1997; instead of returning to corporate marketing, she decided to join the family endeavor. “Even with zero marketing, people were contacting him asking when they could take the test,” she says. “I began to think, maybe there’s something here.” In 2001 she became president of the Association of Professionals in Business Management, the non-profit organization her father created to administer the test.

The Vallabhanenis spent four years developing the curriculum, a mash-up of concepts from MBA programs and specialized business certifications. So heavy are the resulting preparation texts and workbooks that she totes them in a wheeled suitcase. “There is plenty on this test that I never saw at Harvard Business School,” she says. Its first three sections cover “functional” topics such as operations, marketing, finance, and international business; the last requires a written analysis of an HBS case study.

“This is something you really wish would have come from inside business schools,” says Rakesh Khurana, an associate professor at HBS who advised Vallabhaneni during development of the CBM. “If you went to the average elite busi- ness school today and asked the faculty what students need to know, you would have a very hard time getting a coherent answer.”

Skeptics point out that the CBM cannot measure intangibles such as leadership and communication skills. “Management requires a lot of stuff that doesn’t lend itself nicely to a written exam,” says Robert S. Rubin, assistant professor of management at DePaul University, whose study on the relevance of the MBA made waves at a recent meeting of business scholars. But Vallabhaneni insists that her exam is not designed to replace the MBA, but to dovetail with it, and that, at the moment, the CBM serves corporations more than business schools. Most test-takers are sponsored by their employers, who shell out $2,500 per person for materials and fees. IBM was the first company to sponsor a CBM contingent, followed by the telecom firm Avaya.

“It’s evolutionary,” Vallabhaneni says. “When you’re just getting started, everyone’s like ‘Why?’ But when they see the value, no one will think twice.”

Think you could ace the CBM exam? Test your management prowess with sample questions.