this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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188
ChatGPT outperforms undergrads in intro-level courses, falls short later (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Researchers create 30 fake student accounts to submit model-generated responses to real exams. Professors grade the 200 or 1500 word responses from the AI undergrads and gave them better grades than real students 84% of the time. 6% of the bot respondents did get caught, though... for being too good. Meanwhile, AI detection tools? Total bunk.

Will AI be the new calculator... or the death of us all (obviously the only alternative).

Note: the software was NOT as good on the advanced exams, even though it handled the easier stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Not at all surprising. ChatGPT 'knows' a course's content insofar as it's memorized the textbook and all the exam questions. Once you start asking it questions it's never seen before (more likely for advanced topics that don't have a billion study guides and tutorials for) it falls short, even for basic questions that'd just require a bit of additional logic.

Mind you, memorizing everything is impressive and can get you a degree, but when tasked with a new problem never seen before ChatGPT is completely inadequate.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Right? Can students use the internet on this test? Because the LLMs have the entire internet to search for the answers, and I guarantee you those textbooks and exam questions are online and searchable.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wonder how undergrads would do on the same exams given unlimited time and internet access but with LLMs blocked. That's essentially what the LLMs have.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The LLMs blocked themselves?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I don't think they really query one another. Maybe they do though?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Memorizing everything is impressive for a human.

It's less impressive for a computer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

This is incorrect as was shown last year with the Skill-Mix research:

Furthermore, simple probability calculations indicate that GPT-4's reasonable performance on k=5 is suggestive of going beyond "stochastic parrot" behavior (Bender et al., 2021), i.e., it combines skills in ways that it had not seen during training.