Experts Believe ChatGPT Will Ace Accounting Exam Soon
OpenAI recently launched its latest AI chatbot product, GPT-4, which uses machine learning to generate natural language text, and according to the company, the bot passed the bar exam, scored in the 90th percentile, and aced numerous other assessments. But what about accounting exams? Researchers at BYU and 186 other universities tested the original ChatGPT to find out.
The results showed that while ChatGPT still has room for improvement in accounting, it will revolutionize the way students and faculty teach and learn accounting. Lead author of the study, David Wood, said, "When this technology first came out, everyone was worried that students could now use it to cheat… we’re trying to focus on what we can do with this technology now that we couldn’t do before to improve the teaching process for faculty and the learning process for students. Testing it out was eye-opening."
ChatGPT became the fastest growing technology platform in its history, reaching 100 million users in under two months since its introduction in November 2022. Due to intense debate about how AI models like ChatGPT should factor into education, Wood decided to recruit as many professors as possible to see how the AI would fare against actual university accounting students. His co-author recruiting pitch on social media went viral, with 327 co-authors from 186 educational institutions in 14 countries participating in the research, contributing 25,181 classroom accounting exam questions.
The study found that although ChatGPT's performance was impressive, students performed better overall, scoring an average of 76.7%, compared to ChatGPT's score of 47.4%. The AI bot did well on accounting information systems (AIS), and auditing but struggled with managerial accounting and tax, possibly due to the mathematical processes required for these areas. ChatGPT did better on true/false questions and multiple-choice questions but struggled with short-answer questions.
Despite the impressive results, the authors believe that GPT-4 will improve exponentially on the accounting questions posed in their study and the issues mentioned above. They find the most promising feature is how the chatbot can help improve teaching and learning, including the ability to design and test assignments or draft project portions. The researchers believe this is "an opportunity to reflect on whether we are teaching value-added information or not" and that "this is going to force us to use them (TAs) in different ways."
In conclusion, while ChatGPT did not ace the accounting exam, experts believe that it will soon do so. The chatbot represents a significant opportunity to improve the teaching and learning processes.
