What happens when ChatGPT takes a university exam?
It’s clear that GenAI tools can already effectively deal with and solve many of the topics taught to university students
MaREI’s Barry Hayes from University College Cork wrote a piece for RTE’s Brainstorm that looks into what happens when ChatGPT takes a university exam?
As a lecturer in UCC’s School of Engineering, I decided to ask ChatGPT to attempt some of the exam questions I had previously given to my undergraduate students. I got ChatGPT and DeepSeek to attempt my Electrical Power Engineering summer 2024 exam paper and compared its performance to our undergraduate students.
I fed all the exam paper questions to ChatGPT with no additional information or prompts. I then graded ChatGPT’s output, carefully following the marking scheme I used to mark the 61 undergraduate students that sat this exam in May 2024.
The results astonished me. GPT-4o mini, the most widely used free version of ChatGPT, did not just pass the exam, it scored 90%, while DeepSeek-R1 scored even better with 94%. Both produced the answers to each exam question in seconds, without seeing any of the lectures or tutorial materials that my undergraduate students received.
