ChatGPT has passed an MBA exam and a professor is sounding the alarm
ChatGPT has alarmed high school teachers who fear students will use it — or other new artificial intelligence tools — to cheat on assignment writing. But the concern doesn’t stop at the high school level. At the renowned Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Christian Terwiesch wondered what such AI tools mean for MBA programs.
This week, Terwiesch published a research paper documenting how ChatGPT performed on the final exam of a typical core MBA course, Operations Management.
The AI chatbot, he wrote, “does an excellent job on basic operational management and process analysis issues, including those based on case studies.”
He noted that it had flaws, including the ability to handle “more advanced process analysis questions.”
But ChatGPT, he noted, “would have received a B to B grade on the exam.”
Elsewhere, it has also “performed well in the creation of legal documents, and some believe the next generation of this technology may even be able to pass the bar exam,” he noted.
ChatGPT ‘will not go away’
Of course, ChatGPT is “only in its infancy,” as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban noted in an interview with this week No bot, an AI newsletter. He added: “Imagine what GPT 10 will look like.”
Andrew Karolyi, dean of Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business, agrees financial times this week: “One thing we all know for sure is that ChatGPT is not going away. If anything, these AI techniques just keep getting better and better. Faculty and university administrators need to invest to educate themselves.”
This is especially true for software giant Microsoft, which is considering a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, a few years ago after an initial $1 billion investment. And Google parent Alphabet is responding by pouring resources into similar tools to meet the challenge it fears could hurt its search dominance.
So people will use these tools whether they want to or not, including MBA students.
“My belief is that AI will not replace humans, but humans using AI will replace humans,” Kara McWilliams, head of the ETS Product Innovation Lab, which offers a tool that can identify AI-generated responses, said the Just.
Terwiesch, introducing his article, pointed to the impact electronic calculators are having on the corporate world – and suggested that something similar could be happening with tools like ChatGPT.
“Before the advent of calculators and other computing devices, many companies employed hundreds of people whose job it was to manually perform mathematical operations such as multiplication or matrix inversions,” he wrote. “Obviously, such tasks are now being automated, and the value of the skills involved has decreased dramatically. Likewise, any automation of the skills taught in our MBA programs could potentially diminish the value of an MBA education.”
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