My essay-writing process for my MBA was:
- decide what I wanted to say about the subject, from the set of opinions I already possess
- search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.
- write the essay. Scan the reference papers for the specific bit of it that best supported the point I want to make.
There was zero learning involved in this process. The production of the essay was more about developing journal search skills than absorbing any knowledge about the subject. There are always enough papers to support any given point of view, the trick was finding them.
I don't see how making this process even more efficient by delegating the entire thing to an LLM is affecting any actual education here.
I literally wrote a friends psychology paper when I had no idea of the subject and they got a HD for it.
All I did was follow the process you outlined.
My mother used to do it as a service for foreign language students. They would record their lectures, and she would write their papers for them.
Confession. I became disillusioned with a teacher of a subject in school, who I was certain had taken a disliking to me.
I tested it by getting hold of a paper which had received an A from another school on the same subject, copying it verbatim and submitting it for my assignment. I received a low grade.
Despite confirming what I suspected, it somehow still wasn't a good feeling.
I attended a catholic high school for several years, and I noticed a pattern. If I submitted an assignment to certain teachers and the subject related to a non catholic religion, I would get a pass, at the lowest score possible, regardless of the quality of the content.
So I just kept submitting assignments on the wrong religions. Write up about a saint? Pick a russian orthodox saint. Write up on marriage customs? Use islam. That way I could never fail.
To be honest, that's a problem on your part. It is completely possible to write a paper on anything, using the scientific method as your framework.
But the problem is that in many cases, the degrees (like MBA, which I too hold) are merely formalities to move up the corporate ladder, or pivot to something else. You don't get rewarded extra for actually doing science. And, yes, I've done the exact same thing you did, multiple times, in multiple different classes. Because I knew that if what I did just looked and sounded proper enough, I'd get my grade.
To be fair, one of the first things I noticed when entering the "professional" workforce, was that the methodology was the same: Find proof / data that supports your assumptions. And if you can't find any, find something close enough and just interpret / present it in a way that supports your assumptions.
No need for any fancy hypothesis testing, or having to conclude that your assumptions were wrong. Like it is not your opinion or assumption anyway, and you don't get rewarded for telling your boss or clients that they're wrong.
Is there even such a thing as the "science of business"? One can form a hypothesis, and then conduct an experiment, but the experimental landscape is so messy that eliminating all other considerations is impossibly hard.
For example, there's a popular theory that the single major factor in startup success is timing - that the market is "ready" for ideas at specific times, and getting that timing right is the key factor in success. But it's impossible to predict when the market timing is right, you only find out in retrospect. How would you ever test this theory? There are so many other factors, half of which are outside the control of the experimenter, that you would have to conduct the experiment hundreds of time (effectively starting and failing at hundreds of startups) to exclude the confounding factors.
I’m sorry for that.
May I ask a different question, why didn’t, or what stoped, you from engaging with the material itself ?
To be honest, I found "the material" irrelevant, mostly. There's vast swathes of papers written about obscure and tiny parts of the overall subject. Any given paper is probably correct, but covering such a tiny part of the subject that spending the time reading all of them is inefficient (if not impossible).
Also, given that the subject in question is "business", and the practice of business was being changed (as it is again now) by the application of new technology, so a lot of what I was reading was only borderline applicable any more.
MBAs are weird. To qualify to do one you need to have years of practical experience managing in actual business. But then all of that knowledge and experience is disregarded, and you're expected to defer to papers written by people who have only ever worked in academia and have no practical experience of what they're studying. I know this is the scientific process, and I respect that. But how applicable is the scientific process to management? Is there even a "science" of management?
So, like all my colleagues, I jumped through the hoops set in front of me as efficiently as possible in order to get the qualification.
I'm not saying it was worthless. I did learn a lot. The class discussions, hearing about other people's experiences, talking about specific problems and situations, this was all good solid learning. But the essays were not.
> - search for enough papers that could support that position. Don't read the papers, just scan the abstracts.
Wrote wrote those papers? How did they learn to write them? At some point, somebody along the chain had to, you know, produce an actual independent thought.
Interesting question. It seems to me that the entire business academia could be following the method I've outlined and no-one would notice. Or care.
It's not like the hard sciences - no-one is able to refute anything, because you can't conduct experiments. You can always find some evidence for any given hypothesis, as the endless stream of self-help (and often contradictory) business books show.
None of the academics I was reading had actually run a business or had any practical experience of business. They were all lifelong academics who were writing about it from an academic perspective, referencing other academics.
Business is not short of actual independent thought. Verification is the thing it's missing. How does anyone know that the brilliant idea they just had is actually brilliant? The only way is to go and build a business around it and see if it works. Academics don't do that. How is this science then?