2 Introduction The Master of Business Administrat ion (MBA) degree is one of the m ost popular graduate degrees in the wo rld. There exist many elements that toge ther create the “MBA experience,” including admissions, experiential learning, fun activities, networking, and job placement . Tho ugh as a business school professor with 25 years o f t eaching experience my view might be biased, I firmly believe (and very much ho pe) that the acquisition and certification of specific management skills also belongs to this list of impo rtant elements. The value of any skill depends on ho w useful the skill is in the world as well as on how many others are out there mastering the same skill. Prior to the introduction of calculators and other co mput ing devices, ma ny firms employed hundreds of employees whose task it was to manually perform mathematical ope rations suc h as multiplications or matrix inversions. Obvio usly, suc h tasks are now automated, and the value of the associat ed skills has dramatically decreased. In the same way any automation of the skills taught in our MBA programs could pot entially reduce the value of an M BA education. One might argue that OpenAI’s C hat GPT i s the closest that technology has come so far in automating some of the skills of hig hly compensated knowledge workers in ge neral and specifically the kno wl edge w orkers in the jobs held by our MBA graduates including analysts, managers, and con su ltants. Chat GPT has demonstrated a remarkable capability of perfo rming professional tasks such as writing so ftware code (including documentation and run time analysis, Kim 2022). It also performed well in the preparatio n of legal documents and some be lie ve that the next generation of this technology might even be able to pass the bar exam. A s an operations management pro fessor at Wharton and as an author of one of the most widely used operations ma nagement textbooks (Cachon and Terwiesch 2018), I thus was curiou s t o see how Chat GPT would perform o n th e final exam of my Wharton MBA course. To find out, I uploaded some of my exam que stions to Ch at GPT and then graded the respon ses. T he purpose of this paper is to docum ent h ow Chat GPT did on my exam (including a grade !) a nd re flect o n t he implications of this “academic per forma nce”. To preview, here is what I fo und: • Ch at GP T does an amazing job at basic operat ions man age ment and process analysis questions inc luding those that are based on case s tudies. Not onl y are the answers correct, but t he e xp lanations are exc ellent. • As others have argued before me, Ch at GP T at tim es makes surprising mistakes in relatively si mp le calculations at the level of 6 th gra de M ath . These mistakes can be massive in magnitude.
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