ChatGPT has frightened high-school teachers, who are worrying that students may use it to cheat on writing assignments. However, the AI-powered program is of greater concern to Universities. At the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business, professor Christian Terwiesch has been raising the alarm on what such A.I. tools mean for MBA programs. 

This week, Terwiesch released a research paper in which he showcased how ChatGPT performed on the final exam of a typical MBA core course, Operations Management.

The A.I. chatbot, he wrote, “does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies.”

It did have shortcomings, he noted, including being able to handle “more advanced process analysis questions.” 

But ChatGPT, he determined, “would have received a B to B- grade on the exam.” 

It has also “performed well in the preparation of legal documents and some believe that the next generation of this technology might even be able to pass the bar exam,” he noted.

Imagine what ChatGPT 10 Could Do

Of course, ChatGPT is “just in its infancy,” as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban noted this week in an interview with Not a Bot, an A.I. newsletter. He added, “Imagine what GPT 10 is going to look like.”

Andrew Karolyi, dean of Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business, agrees, telling the Financial Times this week: “One thing we all know for sure is that ChatGPT is not going away. If anything, these AI techniques will continue to get better and better. Faculty and university administrators need to invest to educate themselves.”

So people will be using these tools, like it or not, including MBA students.

“I’m of the mind that AI isn’t going to replace people, but people who use AI are going to replace people,” Kara McWilliams, head of ETS Product Innovation Labs, which offers a tool that can identify AI-generated answers, told the Times. 

“Prior to the introduction of calculators and other computing devices, many firms employed hundreds of employees whose task it was to manually perform mathematical operations such as multiplications or matrix inversions,” he wrote. “Obviously, such tasks are now automated, and the value of the associated skills has dramatically decreased. In the same way any automation of the skills taught in our MBA programs could potentially reduce the value of an MBA education.”