Artificial intelligence passes graduation exam in Austria

By Timo Kirez

GENEVA (AA) - Chatbot ChatGBT has little trouble with Austrian graduation exams, public broadcaster ORF reported Thursday.

According to the report, the Lower Austria Student Council provided the chatbot with the math, English and German questions from last year's final school exams in Austria.

In German, as well as in math, the tool achieved a "sufficient" and in English a "satisfactory." In German, the ChatGPT results were corrected by a teacher; in mathematics and English, the solutions were compared with the known solutions.

However, with the overall result, the artificial intelligence tool would have passed the test. It was also emphasized that the solutions were worked out with version three of the chatbot. Meanwhile, a faster and much more advanced version is available.

"It is a classic pointing out of our technical state currently and also a pointing out that the education system in our time is nevertheless also lagging behind a bit," the Austrian general secondary school spokesman, Marco Gayer, told ORF.

The development of chatbots like ChatGPT could possibly mean an end to classical rote learning in schools. This type of learning strategy has been questioned for quite some time.

For this reason, a petition by the Lower Austria Student Council is to be launched soon on this topic. The young people are calling for increased digitization as well as better equipment for schools and a reorientation of teaching toward other competencies.