ChatGPT: A Good Computer Engineering Student? : An Experiment on its Ability to Answer Programming Questions from Exams

Abstract: The release of ChatGPT has really set new standards for what an artificial intelligence chatbot should be. It has even shown its potential in answering university-level exam questions from different subjects. This research is focused on evaluating its capabilities in programming subjects. To achieve this, coding questions taken from software engineering exams were posed to the AI (N = 23) through an experiment. Then, statistical analysis was done to find out how good of a student ChatGPT is by analyzing its answer’s correctness, degree of completion, diversity of response, speed of response, extraneity, number of errors, length of response and confidence levels. GPT-3.5 is the version analyzed. The experiment was done using questions from three different programming subjects. Afterwards, results showed a 93% rate of correct answer generation, demonstrating its competence. However, it was found that the AI occasionally produces unnecessary lines of code that were not asked for and thus treated as extraneity. The confidence levels given by ChatGPT, which were always high, also didn't always align with response quality which showed the subjectiveness of the AI’s self-assessment. Answer diversity was also a concern, where most answers were repeatedly written nearly the same way. Moreover, when there was diversity in the answers, it also caused much more extraneous code. If ChatGPT was to be blind tested for a software engineering exam containing a good number of coding questions, unnecessary lines of code and comments could be what gives it away as being an AI. Nonetheless, ChatGPT was found to have great potential as a learning tool. It can offer explanations, debugging help, and coding guidance just as any other tool or person could. It is not perfect though, so it should be used with caution.