Nelson Mandela University profs recognised for ChatGPT research

Two professors from the Nelson Mandela University have reportedly received an international business conference for their research paper that showed ChatGPT can pass an MBA in South Africa.

Andre Calitz who is a distinguished professor in the Department of Computing Sciences, and his wife Margaret Cullen who the professor to MBA and DBA students at the Nelson Mandela University Business School, beat over 283 other papers that were submitted to the conference.

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, in the last week of September.

The IBC 2023 Conference is a platform that is multi-disciplinary for research on recent developments in an ever-turbulent business environment. It gets to be presented and debated among academics and industry professionals from across the Southern African region and abroad.

Ever since ChatGPT emerged last year in November, the generative artificial intelligence (AI) bot has become one of the most discussed technological developments across all industries. Through their research, the award-winning Nelson Mandela academics set out to establish whether ChatGPT could pass the examination papers of MBA modules presented at business schools in SA.

After ChatGPT passed an MBA operational management module exam in 2022 in the US, the South African-focused research question addressed in this paper was: “Can ChatGPT pass MBA modules in SA?”

Presented to ChatGPT were the 2022 examination papers for MBA modules from different business schools in SA, and answers were generated by the bot and marked by the specific course examiners. ChatGPT passed 12 of the 15 modules, according to the research paper.

Calitz said that 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

“Presently, none of the academics at South African business schools indicated they are using ChatGPT in their courses. The results indicate ChatGPT can indeed pass some MBA examinations and therefore academics need to be aware of the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT.” – he added.

According to Nelson Mandela University, the paper is the first study of this nature conducted in SA and Africa. The paper also provides educational guidelines for the use of ChatGPT in educational programmes.

It recommends that academics and educators adapt their instructional approaches to meet students’ unique needs.