A student does very well in an exam, even though he never attended the lecture. ChatGPT makes it possible.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s at school, during an apprenticeship or during your studies: Those who take exams and exams also like to procrastinate. After all, tomorrow is another day. And that applies every day!
This often leads to the fact that shortly before the exam you start cramming through the night to just about make it to the minimum grade – or are we assuming too much of ourselves?
At least we can’t be the only ones, because the user has u/151N reported about it on Reddit, how he learned for an exam in record time with ChatGPT. To his own surprise, this venture went extremely well. But always in order.
ChatGPT as a learning assistant
151N had a serious problem a few days ago: he was allegedly due to personal problems not in his English class for months.
Three days before the exam he then had to realize (apparently surprised) that he didn’t have the faintest idea about the material and that he would probably fail the exam.
Luckily he came up with a solution pretty quickly: ChatGPT.
He has found that every lecture on Echo360 was transcribed and copied it to ChatGPT. To do this, he entered the following prompt:
»Analyze this lecture and use your algorithms to decide which information is relevant to the exam. Make a list.«
After the first attempt failed, he had the lectures shortened in text form. For that he has paraphraser.io used. He was said to be able to shorten every 7,000 to 8,000 characters to around 1,000 characters. Only then could ChatGPT analyze the data.
He then listed the lecturer’s key points and asked ChatGPT to define the terms that were considered “important” in each lecture. To do this, he took the transcriptions and the textbook to hand.
Stan from South Park also knows about the power of ChatGPT.
Overall he needed eight to ten hours for the summary. Without ChatGPT, he would have reportedly spent dozens of hours on it.
On the last day before the exam, he apparently bundled all the information again and was able to find out the next day that the three days of hard work were worth it. The exam is said to have been almost congruent with what he learned:
»[…]it was almost as if the exam was an exact copy of what I had been studying«
The result: 94 percent learn for three days – without ever having attended a lecture. That’s easy to see.
Tips: This is how you can imitate it
If you have the necessary information about your course (transcript and/or digital textbook) then you can replicate the above process with relative ease. The problem are subjects whose structure and tasks work differently than with languages.
Mathematics for example.
In scientific subjects such as math, information is harder to summarize, since explanations for complex events can hardly be shortened. Possibly missing in the end even important details.
For this reason, avoid shortening and rather adapt the prompts that you use for the respective subjects.
Reddit user 151N has in a follow-up post an example of a suitable math prompt:
»ChatGPT, it’s your job:
- Analyzing the transcript (or textbook) and telling me what it’s about
- List each relevant formula
- Explain each formula with an in-depth analysis
- List and sort each formula based on the number of times it was mentioned
[Transkript posten]«
You should also adapt the prompts for other subjects accordingly.
But remember: AI technology is still far from perfect. Be careful what you believe and learn. If you are not sure whether ChatGPT is not giving you false information, then it is better to double-check whether everything is correct. And going to lectures is of course also a sensible option.
Would you use ChatGPT for learning? Do you perhaps already have experience in this direction? For which subjects have you already used ChatGPT? Do you see a problem with these learning methods or is this the future of education? As always, let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!
