ChatGPT can Outperform University Students at Writing Assignments

ChatGPT may match or even exceed the average grade of university students when answering assessment questions across a range of subjects including computer science, political studies, engineering, and psychology, reports a paper published in Scientific Reports. The research also found that almost three-quarters of students surveyed would use ChatGPT to help with their assignments, despite many educators considering its use to be plagiarism.

To investigate how ChatGPT performed when writing university assessments compared to students, Talal Rahwan and Yasir Zaki invited faculty members who taught32 different courses at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) to provide three student submissions each for ten assessment questions that they had set. ChatGPT was then asked to produce three sets of answers to the ten questions, which were then assessed alongside student-written answers by three graders (who were unaware of the source of the answers). The ChatGPT-generated answers achieved a similar or higher average grade than students in 9 of 32 courses. Only mathematics and economics courses saw students consistently outperform ChatGPT. ChatGPT outperformed students most markedly in the 'Introduction to Public Policy' course, where its average grade was 9.56 compared to 4.39 for students.

The authors also surveyed views on whether ChatGPT could be used to assist with university assignments among 1,601 individuals from Brazil, India, Japan, the US, and the UK (including at least 200 students and 100 educators from each country). 74 percent of students indicated that they would use ChatGPT in their work. In contrast, in all countries, educators underestimated the proportion of students that plan to use ChatGPT and 70 percent of educators reported that they would treat its use as plagiarism.

Finally, the authors report that two tools for identifying AI-generated text - GPTZero and AI text classifier - misclassified the ChatGPT answers generated in this research as written by a human 32 percent and 49 percent of the time respectively.

Together, these findings offer insights that could inform policy for the use of AI tools within educational settings.

Ibrahim H, Liu F, Asim R, Battu B, Benabderrahmane S, Alhafni B, Adnan W, Alhanai T, AlShebli B, Baghdadi R, Bélanger JJ, Beretta E, Celik K, Chaqfeh M, Daqaq MF, Bernoussi ZE, Fougnie D, Garcia de Soto B, Gandolfi A, Gyorgy A, Habash N, Harris JA, Kaufman A, Kirousis L, Kocak K, Lee K, Lee SS, Malik S, Maniatakos M, Melcher D, Mourad A, Park M, Rasras M, Reuben A, Zantout D, Gleason NW, Makovi K, Rahwan T, Zaki Y.
Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses.
Sci Rep. 2023 Aug 24;13(1):12187. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-38964-3

Most Popular Now

Unlocking the 10 Year Health Plan

The government's plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive of SPARK TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it...

Alcidion Grows Top Talent in the UK, wit…

Alcidion has today announced the addition of three new appointments to their UK-based team, with one internal promotion and two external recruits. Dr Paul Deffley has been announced as the...

AI can Find Cancer Pathologists Miss

Men assessed as healthy after a pathologist analyses their tissue sample may still have an early form of prostate cancer. Using AI, researchers at Uppsala University have been able to...

AI, Full Automation could Expand Artific…

Automated insulin delivery (AID) systems such as the UVA Health-developed artificial pancreas could help more type 1 diabetes patients if the devices become fully automated, according to a new review...

How AI could Speed the Development of RN…

Using artificial intelligence (AI), MIT researchers have come up with a new way to design nanoparticles that can more efficiently deliver RNA vaccines and other types of RNA therapies. After training...

MIT Researchers Use Generative AI to Des…

With help from artificial intelligence, MIT researchers have designed novel antibiotics that can combat two hard-to-treat infections: drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae and multi-drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Using generative AI algorithms, the research...

AI Hybrid Strategy Improves Mammogram In…

A hybrid reading strategy for screening mammography, developed by Dutch researchers and deployed retrospectively to more than 40,000 exams, reduced radiologist workload by 38% without changing recall or cancer detection...

Penn Developed AI Tools and Datasets Hel…

Doctors treating kidney disease have long depended on trial-and-error to find the best therapies for individual patients. Now, new artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed by researchers in the Perelman School...

New Training Year Starts at Siemens Heal…

In September, 197 school graduates will start their vocational training or dual studies in Germany at Siemens Healthineers. 117 apprentices and 80 dual students will begin their careers at Siemens...

Are You Eligible for a Clinical Trial? C…

A new study in the academic journal Machine Learning: Health discovers that ChatGPT can accelerate patient screening for clinical trials, showing promise in reducing delays and improving trial success rates. Researchers...

New AI Tool Addresses Accuracy and Fairn…

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has developed a new method to identify and reduce biases in datasets used to train machine-learning algorithms...

Global Study Reveals How Patients View M…

How physicians feel about artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine has been studied many times. But what do patients think? A team led by researchers at the Technical University of Munich...