ChatGPT Performs Worse Than Students at Accounting Exams, Struggles With Mathematical Process

ChatGPT often provided explanations for its answers, even if they were incorrect.
ChatGPT Performs Worse Than Students at Accounting Exams, Struggles With Mathematical Process
ChatGPT often provided explanations for its answers, even if they were incorrect.

In 11.3 percent of the questions, ChatGPT was found to score higher
The bot performed worse on tax, financial, managerial assessments
The AI bot uses machine learning to generate natural language text
ChatGPT Performs Worse Than Students at Accounting Exams, Struggles With Mathematical Process
OpenAI made ChatGPT available for free to the public for testing in Novemnber 2022

Researchers found students to have fared better at accounting exams than ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot product.

Despite this, they said that ChatGPT’s performance was “impressive” and that it was a “game changer that will change the way everyone teaches and learns – for the better.” The researchers from Brigham Young University (BYU), US, and 186 other universities wanted to know how OpenAI’s technology would fare on accounting exams. They have published their findings in the journal Issues in Accounting Education.In the researchers’ accounting exam, students scored an overall average of 76.7 percent, compared to ChatGPT’s score of 47.4 percent.
While in 11.3 percent of the questions, ChatGPT was found to score higher than the student average, doing particularly well on accounting information systems (AIS) and auditing, the AI bot was found to perform worse on tax, financial, and managerial assessments. Researchers think this could possibly be because ChatGPT struggled with the mathematical processes required for the latter type.

The AI bot, which uses machine learning to generate natural language text, was further found to do better on true/false questions (68.7 percent correct) and multiple-choice questions (59.5 percent), but struggled with short-answer questions (between 28.7 and 39.1 percent).