ChatGPT has been used in various ways, asked to compose poetry and music, treated as a search engine, and even feared to cost people their jobs ever since it was rolled out to the public. But for the first time ever it was made to appear for examinations. The test was for operations management course, which is a core MBA subject set by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.
“Chat GPT3 would have received a B to B- grade on the exam,” Professor Christian Terwiesch, wrote in the paper, which was cited by Financial Times. “This has important implications for business school education.”
“OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general and specifically the knowledge workers in the jobs held by MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and consultants,” according to Terwiesch.
The professor wrote that the chatbot was able to do “professional tasks” such as “writing software code and preparing legal documents.” Terwiesch concluded that the chatbot does an “amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies.”
“First, it does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies,” said Terwiesch in his paper. “Not only are the answers correct, but the explanations are excellent.”
This is a matter of concern and interest for educators, and just about everyone else living in the age of automation. Academics have been fretting that assistive systems like ChatGPT and GitHub’s Copilot (based on an OpenAI model called Codex) will require teachers to reevaluate how they teach and mark exams because assistive technology based on machine learning has become so capable.
However, when it comes to math, even ChatGPT has its limitations. Talking about the same, the professor said, “I was just overwhelmed by the beauty of the wording — concise, choice of words, structure. It was absolutely brilliant… but the math is so horrible.”
A Financial Times report quotes Francisco Veloso, dean of Imperial College Business School in London, saying, “We are having serious discussions and a working group is analyzing the implications of ChatGPT and other similar tools that we know our resourceful and inventive students are using, and we will be formulating policies around that soon.”
