Their paper titled “ChatGPT: The New MBA Student in your Class”, received the Best Paper Award at this year’s 16th International Business Conference (IBC 2023) hosted in Swakopmund, Namibia, last week.
The IBC 2023 Conference is a multi-disciplinary platform where research on recent developments in an ever-turbulent business environment is presented and debated, among academics and industry professionals from across the Southern African region and abroad.
The dynamic duo who beat over 283 other papers that were submitted are Department of Computing Sciences Distinguished Professor, Prof Andre Calitz, and his wife, Prof Margaret Cullen, a full professor to MBA and DBA students at the NMU Business School.
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The NMU academics set out, through their research, to prove whether ChatGPT could pass the examination papers of MBA modules presented at Business Schools in South Africa.
“The 2022 examination papers for MBA modules from different Business Schools in South Africa were presented to ChatGPT, answers were generated and marked by the specific course examiners.
"ChatGPT passed 12 of the 15 modules.
"The feedback provided by the examiners was that ChatGPT successfully provided facts, however when new case studies were used, the application could not produce correct answers nor insight and application,” said Calitz.
The winning paper recommends that academics and educators must adapt their instructional approaches to meet the unique needs of scholars and students.
They recommend using AI-supported tools and technologies to innovate and strengthen their lesson planning and presentation to engage the students, and their paper provides guidelines for the use of ChatGPT in educational programmes.
