"It's not like Jarvis, but it's pretty close!" -- Examining ChatGPT's Usage among Undergraduate Students in Computer Science
It addresses the gap in understanding student usage of LLMs in computing education, which is incremental as it shifts focus from instructor evaluations to student perspectives.
This study investigated how undergraduate computer science students use ChatGPT for coursework, finding that over 57% have a positive outlook on its adoption as an aid, but also identified challenges for long-term acceptance.
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google Bard have garnered significant attention in the academic community. Previous research has evaluated these LLMs for various applications such as generating programming exercises and solutions. However, these evaluations have predominantly been conducted by instructors and researchers, not considering the actual usage of LLMs by students. This study adopts a student-first approach to comprehensively understand how undergraduate computer science students utilize ChatGPT, a popular LLM, released by OpenAI. We employ a combination of student surveys and interviews to obtain valuable insights into the benefits, challenges, and suggested improvements related to ChatGPT. Our findings suggest that a majority of students (over 57%) have a convincingly positive outlook towards adopting ChatGPT as an aid in coursework-related tasks. However, our research also highlights various challenges that must be resolved for long-term acceptance of ChatGPT amongst students. The findings from this investigation have broader implications and may be applicable to other LLMs and their role in computing education.