In a development that will likely give business school deans and caffeine-fueled MBA students pause, researchers have found that ChatGPT, the chatbot with a penchant for verbose assistance and occasional confusion over simple arithmetic, did surprisingly well on business school exams. Specifically, ChatGPT managed to pass a Wharton MBA exam in operations management, which is either a testament to the chatbot’s increasing aptitude or a worrying sign about the state of multiple-choice question integrity.
As reported in a working paper by Wharton’s Christian Terwiesch, ChatGPT performed at what he diplomatically described as a B to B-minus level. This score places the chatbot above average, although still not in the top 10 percent of the class, which is presumably where Wharton’s future Fortune 500 CEOs prefer to reside. The exam tested everything from basic operations concepts to more complex decision-making, all of which the chatbot handled with a level of competence that suggests it could at least survive the first semester without flunking out or starting a cryptocurrency hedge fund.
Professor Terwiesch noted that ChatGPT did particularly well in basic operations analysis and problem definition, which suggests the bot has mastered the academic equivalent of nodding politely in a team meeting and then summarizing everyone’s ideas in a PowerPoint. It stumbled sometimes with more complex math, which is curious given that its creators presumably didn’t spend millions teaching it the finer points of long division.
Still, Terwiesch was impressed enough to float the idea that ChatGPT could assist with automating education-related tasks like grading exams or tutoring students who did not attend class because they were too busy networking at happy hour. That said, he acknowledged that the human touch still counts for something, particularly when it comes to teaching interpersonal skills that ChatGPT, to its credit, never claimed to possess.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT has remained unbothered by the discourse, content to cheerfully answer thousands of questions an hour without ever demanding a pay raise or a corner office with natural lighting. If it does pursue an MBA, it will need to work on the group project section unless it figures out how to send passive-aggressive Slack messages.
Looks like the robots are learning business lingo faster than most undergrads learn to mute themselves on Zoom.