Generative AI for Programming Education: Benchmarking ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Human Tutors
This addresses the need for a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art generative AI models in programming education, though it is incremental as it builds on prior limited studies.
The study systematically benchmarks ChatGPT and GPT-4 against human tutors across various programming education scenarios, finding that GPT-4 significantly outperforms ChatGPT and approaches human-level performance in several cases.
Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing computing education by powering next-generation educational technologies for introductory programming. Recent works have studied these models for different scenarios relevant to programming education; however, these works are limited for several reasons, as they typically consider already outdated models or only specific scenario(s). Consequently, there is a lack of a systematic study that benchmarks state-of-the-art models for a comprehensive set of programming education scenarios. In our work, we systematically evaluate two models, ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and GPT-4, and compare their performance with human tutors for a variety of scenarios. We evaluate using five introductory Python programming problems and real-world buggy programs from an online platform, and assess performance using expert-based annotations. Our results show that GPT-4 drastically outperforms ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and comes close to human tutors' performance for several scenarios. These results also highlight settings where GPT-4 still struggles, providing exciting future directions on developing techniques to improve the performance of these models.