From left, Professors Elmarie Venter, Andre Calitz and Margaret Cullen.
Computing Science’s Professor Andre Calitz and his wife, Prof Margaret Cullen of the Business School, received the IBC 2023 Best Paper Award for their paper “ChatGPT: The New MBA Student in your Class”.
Business Management’s Dr Welcome Kupangwa and Professors Shelley Farrington and Elmarie Venter received the Best Paper runner-up award for their paper on “Transgenerational Value Transmission: Socialisation Mechanisms in Indigenous African Business-owning Families”.
The conference received over 283 papers and more than 200 people attended the conference.
Professors Calitz and Cullen showed in their paper that ChatGPT can pass the examination papers of MBA modules presented at Business Schools in South Africa and in essence, pass an MBA in South Africa. This is the first study of its kind in South Africa.
The study also formed part of a cover story in the Financial Mail of 28 September.
They do, however, recommend that to ensure that students are doing their own work, educators should set assignments in such a way to require critical, original thinking or creativity in the way knowledge is applied.
One study participant commented that “if you can google the answer, ChatGPT is spot on.” Examiners said that the answers to theoretical questions were of textbook quality, but the artificial intelligence was sometimes less proficient at interpreting case studies.
Predicting an outcome or expressing an opinion was also a problem, but experts say this limitation will be no problem in future with further developments.
This just means that examiners will have to reflect on how they ask their questions, thinking of innovative ways to test knowledge and not just get an AI-generated report.
In their study Dr Kupangwa and Professors Farrington and Venter showed how parents and extended senior family members are socialisation agents, and how both parental and family practices are used as socialisation mechanisms to facilitate transgenerational value transmission in indigenous Black South African business-owning families.
This transmission is a crucial ingredient for enhancing transgenerational entrepreneurship among business-owning families. The study contributes to family business research regarding socialisation and transgenerational value transmission in an indigenous African context. The findings can indeed enhance the growth and survival of Indigenous African businesses.