Could ChatGPT get an Engineering Degree? Evaluating Higher Education Vulnerability to AI Assistants

[Submitted on 7 Aug 2024 (v1), last revised 27 Nov 2024 (this version, v2)]

Authors:Beatriz Borges, Negar Foroutan, Deniz Bayazit, Anna Sotnikova, Syrielle Montariol, Tanya Nazaretzky, Mohammadreza Banaei, Alireza Sakhaeirad, Philippe Servant, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, Jibril Frej, Angelika Romanou, Gail Weiss, Sepideh Mamooler, Zeming Chen, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Mete Ismayilzada, Debjit Paul, Alexandre Schöpfer, Andrej Janchevski, Anja Tiede, Clarence Linden, Emanuele Troiani, Francesco Salvi, Freya Behrens, Giacomo Orsi, Giovanni Piccioli, Hadrien Sevel, Louis Coulon, Manuela Pineros-Rodriguez, Marin Bonnassies, Pierre Hellich, Puck van Gerwen, Sankalp Gambhir, Solal Pirelli, Thomas Blanchard, Timothée Callens, Toni Abi Aoun, Yannick Calvino Alonso, Yuri Cho, Alberto Chiappa, Antonio Sclocchi, Étienne Bruno, Florian Hofhammer, Gabriel Pescia, Geovani Rizk, Leello Dadi, Lucas Stoffl, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Matthieu Bovel, Yueyang Pan, Aleksandra Radenovic, Alexandre Alahi, Alexander Mathis, Anne-Florence Bitbol, Boi Faltings, Cécile Hébert, Devis Tuia, François Maréchal, George Candea, Giuseppe Carleo, Jean-Cédric Chappelier, Nicolas Flammarion, Jean-Marie Fürbringer, Jean-Philippe Pellet, Karl Aberer, Lenka Zdeborová, Marcel Salathé, Martin Jaggi, Martin Rajman, Mathias Payer, Matthieu Wyart, Michael Gastpar, Michele Ceriotti, Ola Svensson, Olivier Lévêque, Paolo Ienne, Rachid Guerraoui, Robert West, Sanidhya Kashyap, Valerio Piazza, Viesturs Simanis, Viktor Kuncak, Volkan Cevher, Philippe Schwaller, Sacha Friedli, Patrick Jermann, Tanja Käser, Antoine Bosselut

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Abstract:AI assistants are being increasingly used by students enrolled in higher education institutions. While these tools provide opportunities for improved teaching and education, they also pose significant challenges for assessment and learning outcomes. We conceptualize these challenges through the lens of vulnerability, the potential for university assessments and learning outcomes to be impacted by student use of generative AI. We investigate the potential scale of this vulnerability by measuring the degree to which AI assistants can complete assessment questions in standard university-level STEM courses. Specifically, we compile a novel dataset of textual assessment questions from 50 courses at EPFL and evaluate whether two AI assistants, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adequately answer these questions. We use eight prompting strategies to produce responses and find that GPT-4 answers an average of 65.8% of questions correctly, and can even produce the correct answer across at least one prompting strategy for 85.1% of questions. When grouping courses in our dataset by degree program, these systems already pass non-project assessments of large numbers of core courses in various degree programs, posing risks to higher education accreditation that will be amplified as these models improve. Our results call for revising program-level assessment design in higher education in light of advances in generative AI.