ChatGPT outperforms humans on Wharton MBA exam: professor

The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot ChatGPT performed better than many students on MBA exams at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a professor said.

Christian Terwiesch, an expert on innovation management at the top-tier business school, wrote a paper titled “Would Chat GPT3 Get a Wharton MBA?”

“Chat GPT3 would have received a B to B- grade on the exam,” 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.” 

ChatGPT generated headlines after it was unveiled in November by OpenAI, the AI-centered research firm that counts among its co-founders Elon Musk.

ChatGPT, which stands for “chat generative pre-trained transformer,” proved itself capable of tasks from solving math problems and writing computer code to providing parenting advice.

Users can access a website for free and type a query into the system. The AI-powered technology, which is trained by machine learning, will respond with the text of an answer within five seconds.

“The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said ChatGPT provides “an early demo of what’s possible.”

“Soon you will be able to have helpful assistants that talk to you, answer questions, and give advice,” Altman told the Guardian.

“Later you can have something that goes off and does tasks for you. Eventually you can have something that goes off and discovers new knowledge for you.”

The chatbot’s potential appears so promising that Microsoft recently announced it would invest some $10 billion with OpenAI to advance the technology.

But schoolteachers and university professors have warned that students can use the technology to cheat on exams.

Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University in South Carolina, recently told The Post that he caught a student using ChatGPT to write an essay for a class assignment.

Earlier this month, New York City’s Department of Education blocked access to OpenAI’s chatbot over concerns that students would abuse the technology.

The ability of ChatGPT to produce content in just a matter of seconds has stoked fears it could replace humans in writing-centered tasks.

But the technology still lacks nuanced and critical thinking skills that are necessary for creative roles that can only be filled by humans.