Students beat ChatGPT in accounting exam. Here’s all you may want to know

Researchers discovered that students performed better than ChatGPT, the chatbot product of OpenAI, in accounting exams. Nonetheless, the researchers praised ChatGPT's remarkable performance and highlighted its potential as a revolutionary tool that can transform the way people teach and learn.

In a study conducted by Brigham Young University and 186 other universities, the researchers aimed to evaluate the performance of OpenAI's technology in accounting exams. Their findings were recently published in the journal Issues in Accounting Education. The results showed that the students obtained an average score of 76.7 per cent, while ChatGPT scored 47.4 per cent.

According to the study, ChatGPT scored higher than the student average in 11.3 per cent of the questions, particularly in accounting information systems (AIS) and auditing. However, the bot struggled with tax, financial, and managerial assessments, which the researchers suggest may be due to its difficulty with the required mathematical processes.


The AI bot uses machine learning to produce natural language text and performed better on true/false questions (68.7 per cent correct) and multiple-choice questions (59.5 per cent), but had lower accuracy on short-answer questions (ranging from 28.7 per cent to 39.1 per cent).

Researchers further noted that ChatGPT found it challenging to answer higher-order questions and sometimes provided incorrect answers with authoritative written explanations or answered the same question in different ways.

David Wood, a BYU accounting professor, recruited many professors to test ChatGPT's abilities against university accounting students. With the help of 327 co-authors from 186 institutions in 14 countries, they contributed over 25,000 classroom accounting exam questions.

The research used 2,268 textbook test bank questions from undergraduate BYU students, covering various accounting topics and question types.

FAQs

Q1:Who developed ChatGPT?
OpenAI

Q2:Who is the CEO of OpenAI?
Sam Altman