I took chatGPT for a spin to see how it will answer some stats questions I ask my students
and here is what I found.
First, for those who don’t know about chat GPT;
it’s language model trained by openAI that can generate responses to questions,
complete sentences or paragraphs based on partial inputs,
and even write entire stories or articles.
To use it, go to openai.com, click Try,
Sign up, You can sign up by email,
by your Google account, Or by Microsoft Account
and you can start using it right away.
So, I asked it to give me 10 ways I can use chatGPT as a student.
So it says, to generate ideas for a research paper or
project, help brainstorm and come up with new ideas
for research To practice writing skills
To generate outlines or summaries That is, you can ask it to summarize a paragraph
or script It can critique or evaluates your writing
or code.
It can help you practice language skills.
It can help generate practice tests.
It can help generate study guides or review materials for exams.
It can provide prompts or ideas for creative writing projects or assignments.
It can generate practice problems.
And of course, it can rephrase sentences and paragraphs in many different way.
As you can see here, #10 is essentially number #3
put in a different form.
And when I ran that prompt again, it gave me the answers in totally different
format and also, with some new points.
But then, I decided to see how my students can use chatGPT to answer the type of questions
I give them.
This is a question I solved on a recent video.
chatGPT recognized it can be solved as a Goodness of Fit test.
And it went on to explain how this can be done,
explaining all the steps required from beginning to the end,
even telling me the limitations of the result in this scenario.
But I want the solution, so, I asked it to conduct the test for me.
So, it calculated the expected values, calculated the test statistic,
obtained the critical value, rejected the null hypothesis,
and wrote the corresponding conclusion accurately.
There is a problem, however.
The total sample size should be 140 but it used 121.
I’m not really sure why.
If you know why, please drop a comment in the chat.
So, students, be careful.
Then I gave it another hypothesis test for the population mean.
It stated the null and alternative hypotheses correctly
and opted for the t-test.
I was expecting it to conduct a z-test since the population standard deviation is
known which it acknowledges, but it used t anyway.
It also said that the calculated test statistic -2.31
is less than the critical value of -3.355 and that is incorrect.
It’s probably thinking in terms of absolute values.
It is however correct in saying that you cannot reject the null hypothesis.
I went further and gave it this question: The mean and median of a sample of three values
are 36 and 22 respectively.
If the median is smaller than the largest value by 54, what is the sample variance?
It identified the middle number as 22 and the largest as 76,
but could not figure out the smallest value, which it represents with x here.
It is supposed to use the mean to find the smallest value.
But it just couldn’t figure it out.
Next, I gave it this one.
And it couldn’t figure it out.
You can see that the system could be overloaded sometimes.
And sometimes you need to refresh your browser to continue working.
Then I asked this counting rule question: how many 4-letter codes are possible out of
9 letters if one of the 9 letters cannot be used.
It figured it out, saying there are 8 letters remaining,
and since repetition is allowed, the number of ways is 8*8*8*8
I also gave it this one and it got it wrong.
It will probably be able to answer these questions correctly in the near future.
The lesson here for instructors is to take these tools into consideration while creating
assessments, and students should understand that they need
to improve their learning skills in order to make the most of these tools.
Thanks for watching.