Exams Around the Corner – Prepare Better with ChatGPT!

Studying for exams no longer has to mean tediously flipping through textbooks or lecture notes. By using ChatGPT, you can learn at your own pace with an incredibly patient, private tutor. No grades, no rushing, and no eye-rolling when you still don’t understand something. Let’s see how you can effectively prepare for exams with the help of ChatGPT.

Remember, however, that ChatGPT is not an encyclopaedia (or Wikipedia), or a textbook with content approved by subject matter experts. If you need specialist definitions or very precise data, don’t forget to verify ChatGPT’s answers with another reliable source (even if you have a version with internet access).

There’s always a chance that the chat might start hallucinating (creatively combining words into answers that seem true but are actually incorrect). It’s more likely to give an answer closer to the truth when you’re exploring general laws of physics than when you decide to learn about the latest changes in the British tax system. So critical thinking must always accompany the learning process – regardless of the tools we use during this learning.

Now that we know the rules of this game, let’s discuss a few creative ways to revise for exams with ChatGPT!

ChatGPT as a Tutor

To start with, think of the chat as your personal learning guide. It can act as a tutor in any area. In this form, it’s worth using it to explore a given field of knowledge, for example, to explain difficult concepts. ChatGPT will tell you what Say’s law of markets is, how the principles of gene inheritance work, or what Plato’s allegory of the cave is all about.

You can respond to the chat’s answers by highlighting specific fragments and asking for further explanation, or by recalling specific terms that you want the chat to explain better. For complicated topics, you can ask it right away in your first prompt to explain the theory in a way that’s clear to a layman in the field, or to provide examples that make understanding easier.

Once you understand a concept that needed explaining, you can ask the chat to test you on the knowledge you’ve learned together. This way, you’ll try to repeat everything in your own words and, as a result, better remember the key concepts.

Individual Exercises with ChatGPT – as Many as You Need

However, it happens often that merely understanding concepts isn’t enough, and you need to apply this knowledge in practice. After all, sometimes tests are simply about operations on complex numbers, calculating chemical solution concentrations, or even changing sentences from active to passive voice in any foreign language. In such cases, you can repeat the rules over and over, but the effect is only a correctly solved problem. If you want to prepare better for them, you can use ChatGPT as a learning aid. Remember, however, that ChatGPT may have problems with calculations and solving mathematical or chemical problems, so we don’t recommend it for independently solving new, unknown problems. So what can you do?

The safest way is to use it as a “translator” of difficult content. Find a set of problems in the area you’re interested in, give ChatGPT the problem content and ask it to solve it. Then check if the result matches the one given in the book. If so, then you can safely ask ChatGPT to explain how it arrived at this result. This way, you can better understand the problem-solving process without the risk of ChatGPT misleading you by happily hallucinating about alternative arithmetic 🙂

Here’s how a prompt in this category might look in practice:

In this case, simply adding information that you’re studying for a test was enough for the Chat to provide specific steps needed to solve it, instead of just the solution:

Remember that there are no clear metrics for the model’s effectiveness, so even if you solve the whole textbook with it and it hits the results from the answer key, you still can’t be sure that it will handle a new, unknown problem without making mistakes. However, since sets of exercises are constructed in such a way that we only receive the problem content and the result itself, an AI teacher that allows you to understand how to approach this problem to achieve the given result can be a really valuable learning aid.

Find Your Own Learning System

If you haven’t come across this text looking for a magical solution the night before the exam, you can also use ChatGPT to build your own effective way of studying for exams. After a whole semester of learning, the range of knowledge to absorb can be daunting (and there are so many subjects!), but by using appropriate methods, you’ll be able to learn more efficiently and effectively. How to do it?

We know that we retain the most when we repeat the knowledge several times – and not at the last minute. Give the chat your exam date, the date you start learning, and the range of topics to learn, and ask it to write out an individual learning plan for you, including revisions, so that you’re best prepared for the day of the exam.

Here’s a sample prompt to use:

I need to prepare for my exams. I have a Spanish language exam at B2 level, which will include tasks from areas such as: use of Indicative mood tenses: future imperfect and future perfect, use of the Subjunctive mood, reported speech, and vocabulary related to work, travel, and ecology. Today is 24 June, and my exam is on 12 July. Could you create a study and revision plan for me so that I'm as well-prepared as possible for the exam? Please provide the answer in a table format.

This way, ChatGPT will help you plan your learning so that you don’t forget any of the topics, and – perhaps even more importantly – don’t forget to revise them!

If you have a specific list of exam topics, you can also ask the chat about the most important concepts/phenomena that you should know in these areas. This way, when you sit down to study, you won’t wonder what to do, but will start systematically following the plan – gaining new knowledge and revising what you’ve learned so far, so that on the night before the exam, you can sleep peacefully.

If you haven’t been very interested in testing different learning methods so far, you can also ask the chat about the most effective ways of learning specific topics. This will give you a new perspective on the whole process and you’ll find that some topics will be easier to grasp when you prepare mind maps, others you’ll remember faster thanks to flashcards, and still others you’ll polish through interactive conversations and tasks from AI.

What will it be this time? Will you stick to independent study or will you use some form of collaboration with ChatGPT before this year’s exams?