Recent studies conducted by Brigham Young University and 186 other universities revealed that students did better on accounting exams than OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. The results of the study, published in the journal Issues in Accounting Education, indicated that students attained an average score of 76.7%, while ChatGPT’s score was 47.4%. The researchers explained that the bot’s ability in higher-order questions such as financial and managerial assessment were not quite up to par as it struggled due to its difficulty in understanding the required mathematical processes. On the other hand, it did better on true-false questions, multiple-choice questions and even accounting information systems (AIS) and auditing.
At the helm of OpenAI is Sam Altman, who has been serving as the CEO since 2015. Since his appointment, OpenAI has been striving to create a world where AI works to benefit humanity and achieve extraordinary results that have never been seen before in the world of technology. ChatGPT is one of their flagship products that is designed to be a revolutionary tool able to transform the way people learn and teach by leveraging the power of machine learning to generate natural language text.
David Wood of the BYU accounting faculty was the mastermind behind the project, which had 327 other authors from 186 different institutions across 14 countries. To put the study in motion, Wood and his cohorts employed 25,000 questions from the textbook test banks and 2,268 questions from university students. By using these questions to compare the performance of students and ChatGPT, it made the study extremely comprehensive and engaging causing many to take note of OpenAI’s potential for the future.
