ChatGPT bot gets C+ passing grade in US law school exam
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Minnesota: After writing essays on subjects like constitutional law, taxation, and torts, a chatbot powered by reams of internet data passed exams at a US law school.
The US company ChatGPT from OpenAI, which last week received a large funding infusion from Microsoft, employs artificial intelligence (AI) to produce streams of text from simple prompts.
The outcomes have been so good that academics have cautioned that they might cause widespread cheating or possibly mean the end of conventional classroom teaching techniques.
The same test that students take, consisting of 95 multiple-choice questions and 12 essay questions, was administered to ChatGPT by Jonathan Choi, a professor at Minnesota University Law School, AFP reported.
He and his coauthors revealed that the bot received an overall grade of C+ in a white paper titled "ChatGPT goes to law school" that was released on Monday.
While this was sufficient for a passing grade, the bot performed poorly in most subjects and "bombed" math multiple-choice questions.
'Not a great student'
"In writing essays, ChatGPT displayed a strong grasp of basic legal rules and had consistently solid organization and composition," the authors wrote.
But the bot "often struggled to spot issues when given an open-ended prompt, a core skill on law school exams".
The use of ChatGPT in schools has been banned in New York and other places, but Choi claimed it would be a useful teaching tool.
"Overall, ChatGPT wasn't a great law student acting alone," he wrote on Twitter.
"But we expect that collaborating with humans, language models like ChatGPT would be very useful to law students taking exams and to practicing lawyers."
He also claimed, in response to another Twitter user, that two out of three markers had picked up on the paper that had been written by a bot, downplaying the possibility of cheating.
"(They) had a hunch and their hunch was right, because ChatGPT had perfect grammar and was somewhat repetitive," Choi wrote.
