ChatGPT has Mastered the Principles of Economics : Now What?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that can generate conversational style responses to user inputs. It also performs extremely well on a popular standardized assessment used in principles of economics courses around the country. ChatGPT ranked in the 91st percentile for Microeconomics and the 99th percentile for Macroeconomics when compared to students who take the TUCE exam at the end of their principles course. The emergence of artificial intelligence presents a significant challenge to traditional assessment methods in higher education. It is not possible to evaluate students’ intellectual ability through artificial intelligence, as it only reflects their ability to access information. An important implication of this finding is that educators will likely need to redesign their curriculum in at least one of the following three ways: reintroduce proctored, in-person assessments, augment learning with chatbots, and/or increase the prevalence of experiential learning projects that artificial intelligence struggles to replicate well