Little Impact of ChatGPT Availability on High School Student Test Score Performance
TLDR
This paper finds no meaningful impact of ChatGPT availability on high school student test score performance, suggesting varied uses balance out.
Key contributions
- Analyzes ChatGPT activity dropoff during summer to identify educational AI use.
- Estimates real-world AI impact on education, moving beyond controlled settings.
- Reveals no meaningful impact of AI usage on high school student test scores.
- Suggests positive and negative student AI uses may balance out in aggregate.
Why it matters
This paper offers a unique real-world perspective on AI's impact on high school education, contrasting with controlled studies. Its findings suggest that concerns about AI negatively affecting student learning, at least as measured by test scores, might be overblown or balanced by positive uses. This is crucial for educators and policymakers.
Original Abstract
In educational settings, AI can be used as a learning aid, but can also be used to avoid schoolwork, thereby passing classes while learning little. Many existing studies on the impact of AI on education focus on AI use in controlled settings or with specialized tools. In this paper, the dropoff in ChatGPT activity during non-school summer months in 2023 and 2024 is used to identify areas with heavy educational AI use and thus estimate the educational impact of AI as it is actually used. I find no meaningful impact of AI usage on high school test score averages in either direction. These results imply that, to the extent that high school students use AI to avoid learning, it either does not matter much for their test performance or is cancelled out by positive uses of AI in the aggregate.
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