Predicting the IB Business Management Paper 1 Case Study

In terms of using AI to help students prepare for their exams, this is probably the most effective way I’ve used it so far.

To provide some context, Paper 1 for IB Business Management is based on a case study. Students receive an excerpt of it (about 15%) and a keyword list approximately three months before the final exam. The purpose of this is to give students a bit of context regarding the main themes and the industry they will be discussing. Our usual, pre-AI method of preparing for the exam would involve meticulously dissecting every sentence, trying to guess what the rest of the case study might be about, how the keywords could be integrated, and then collectively creating a huge list of potential questions that might come up.

Last year, I did something different. Armed with my trusty sidekick, ChatGPT, I first created a GPT model trained on the IB Business Management syllabus and past papers. I then uploaded the excerpt from the IB along with the keyword list. My initial prompt, as shown below, was for ChatGPT to complete the case study for me. I followed up by asking it to generate exam-style questions as well.

The result was unbelievable—a complete case study with IB BM-style exam questions. I went on to create four in total, which we used in class, along with in-depth research into the music festival industry—one that the students genuinely enjoyed. It also played nicely into my collection of festival anecdotes from when I spent three summers in my early twenties touring the UK’s summer festival circuit in a vegan food truck!

If you teach a subject that uses case studies, whether seen or unseen, I can’t recommend ChatGPT (or a similar AI model) enough for generating practice examples for your students. In the past, we probably spent hours thinking up case study ideas and writing them ourselves. Now, you can create brilliant ones in minutes with just a few keystrokes.

Feel free to check out the PDF by clicking here to see the music festival case studies. If you are a BM teacher, they’re all yours—great practice for this year’s cohort on exam technique.