SINGAPORE: The ChatGPT AI machine-learning system appears to be unable to pass the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE), which 12-year-old students in Singapore sit for, according to a recent report by the national broadsheet.
Developed by OpenAI and launched in November of last year, ChatGPT has already gained 100 million users in just a few short months thanks to its ability to understand and generate human-like language. The bot has had a significant impact on various industries and is even said to have made certain jobs, like copywriting, redundant in some businesses.
The popular AI language model has performed exceptionally well in numerous exams, including a final exam at the Wharton business school, four law school exams and even an American medical licensing exam. It, however, had a dismal showing when the Straits Times put it to the test on the PSLE.
The publication compared ChatGPT with students who have taken the PSLE in the past three years using questions from the latest collection of past year papers that are available in bookstores.
ChatGPT received a mere 16 out of 100 points for three math papers, 21 points for the science papers, and 11 out of 20 for the English papers.
The bot was limited in that it was unable to answer questions that involved graphics or charts, receiving zero points for those sections. It, however, performed relatively better in answering questions that it could attempt to solve and managed to answer more than half of the questions in the maths papers and a quarter of the science papers’ questions, which predominantly included graphs as part of the questions.
While some who have read the report have said that the test demonstrates the limitations of the technology, some others perceive the bot’s poor performance on the test as more evidence that the PSLE is too tough for Singaporean pre-teens.
The national exam is widely considered a great source of pressure for 12-year-olds since their scores seemed to determine the rest of their educational future under the streaming system, which divides students according to their PSLE scores and places them in one of three streams: the Express, Normal (Academic) and Normal (Technical) streams.
Those who did well in the PSLE and make it to the Express stream more easily attended junior colleges and polytechnics at the tertiary level while those who performed less well in the PSLE had poorer prospects.
Some of the stress associated with the PSLE was alleviated last year when the Government announced that it will abolish streaming.
The streaming system will be phased out by 2024 and will be replaced with full subject-based banding. Despite this, the PSLE remains a major exam that has longstanding effects on a student’s academic future.