ChatGPT has alarmed high school teachers, who worry that students will use it—or other new artificial intelligence tools—to cheat on writing assignments. But the concerns don’t stop at the high school level. At the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, professor Christian Terwiesch has wondered what these AI tools mean for MBA programs.
This week, Terwiesch released a research paper in which he documented how ChatGPT performed on the final exam of a typical MBA core course, Operations Management.
The chatbot AI, he wrote, “does an excellent job in basic operations management and process analysis questions including those based on case studies.”
They have drawbacks, he said, including being able to handle “more advanced process analysis questions.”
But ChatGPT, he determined, “will receive a grade of B to B in the exam.”
Elsewhere, it is also “to prepare legal documents and some believe that the next generation of this technology may be able to pass the bar exam,” he said.
ChatGPT ‘will never go away’
Of course, ChatGPT is “just in its infancy,” as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban noted this week in an interview with No Bots, the AI newsletter. He added, “Imagine what GPT 10 would be like.”
Andrew Karolyi, dean of Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business, agrees Financial Times this week: “One thing we all know is that ChatGPT will not disappear. If anything, this AI technique will continue to get better and better. Faculty and university administrators must invest in learning themselves.
This is especially true with software giant Microsoft considering a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the venture behind ChatGPT, after an initial $1 billion investment a few years ago. And Google’s parent Alphabet responded by pouring resources into the same tools to answer the challenge, which it fears could undermine its search dominance.
So people will use these tools, like it or not, including MBA students.
“I think that AI will not replace people, but the people who use AI will change people,” said Kara McWilliams, head of ETS Product Innovation Labs, which offers tools that can identify AI-generated answers. , to the multiple.
Terwiesch, in introducing the paper, noted the impact of electronic calculators in the corporate world—and suggested that the same thing could happen with tools like ChatGPT.
“Before the introduction of calculators and other computing devices, many companies employed hundreds of employees who were tasked with manually performing mathematical operations such as multiplication or matrix inversion,” he wrote. “Obviously, these tasks are now being automated, and the value of the associated skills has been greatly reduced. In the same way, the automation of skills taught in MBA programs can reduce the value of an MBA education.
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