While other online gamers have been busy collecting magic items or gunning down opponents MBA students from the UTS Faculty of Business have been besting the top business schools from the USA and Europe in a worldwide online business strategy simulation.

For two years running UTS teams have placed among the grand champions in The Business Strategy Game (BSG), an online competition run by US publisher McGraw-Hill Irwin that attracts a worldwide field of more than 12,000 students divided into thousands of teams.

In the opinion of one of the original developers of BSG, Greg Stappenbeck, UTS teams have dominated the competition in the past two years, topping the list of grand champions in 2005 and placing third and sixth overall in this year's first round.

"It is fair to say that UTS was the most prominent and successful school represented in the competition," Mr Stappenbeck said.

"On average students and teams from UTS perform better in the simulation than students and teams from the US and the rest of the world – this is clearly and absolutely supported by the data from the last two semesters," he said.

The UTS teams' coach and coordinator of the MBA Strategic Management, Antoine Hermens, said the BSG competition was fierce, involving some of the best US Business Schools including the University of Pittsburgh, University of Alabama, University of Maryland, Antioch University, University of New Haven, California State University and Lake Forest Graduate School.

"For UTS MBA students to succeed they have to match the capabilities of competitors worldwide in finance, marketing, management, strategy, operations, information technology and accounting," Mr Hermens said.

He said that besides being a yardstick of the quality of UTS MBA students, the results had put to rest some misconceptions about the abilities of international students in collaborative work.

"Over the years it has been suggested the proportion of international students might affect the overall performance of students, but particularly the performance of groups in complex exercises such as this conducted in high pressure, time limited contexts.

"However, we have found that teams that are both culturally and functionally diverse are consistently the highest achievers.

"We knew they were excelling among UTS teams, now there is firm evidence that these UTS international teams are capable of beating the best teams in the United States."

The BSG challenge is to run an athletic footwear company. The results are measured on brand recognition, global market leadership and financial performance, including earnings per share, return on investment, stock price appreciation and credit rating.

As a result of the UTS teams' performance Mr Hermens has been named a "Master Professor" by the game's operators for both 2005 and 2006. For more information on BSG see http://bsg-online.com.