'Not A Great Student': ChatGPT Clears US Law School Exam With C+ Score

ChatGPT has passed a law school exam in the US and scored C+ overall after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts

After the ChatGPT recently cleared the Wharton MBA exam raising concerns about the value of education, the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot has now passed a law school exam in the US with C+ overall score.

Jonathan Choi, a Minnesota University Law School professor, released a white paper titled "ChatGPT goes to law school" on Monday in which he said the chatbot passed exams after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts, reported news agency AFP.

The bot powered by data from the Internet has scored a C+ overall. The ChatGPT was given the same test designed for students comprising 95 multiple-choice questions and 12 essay questions.

Although the score was enough to clear the exam, the bot ranked near the bottom of the class in most subjects and ‘bombed’ at multiple-choice questions that required mathematics.

"In writing essays, ChatGPT displayed a strong grasp of basic legal rules and had consistently solid organization and composition," the authors of the report wrote. But the bot "often struggled to spot issues when given an open-ended prompt, a core skill on law school exams".

"Overall, ChatGPT wasn't a great law student acting alone," the professor tweeted. "But we expect that collaborating with humans, language models like ChatGPT would be very useful to law students taking exams and to practicing lawyers," he added.

"And playing down the possibility of cheating," he responded to a reaction from a Twitter user that two out of three markers had spotted the bot-written paper.

"(They) had a hunch and their hunch was right, because ChatGPT had perfect grammar and was somewhat repetitive," Choi wrote.

ChatGPT has been banned in schools in New York and other jurisdictions, but Choi believes it could be a valuable teaching aide.

The results were so promising that educators have warned it could lead to widespread cheating and even signal the end of traditional classroom teaching methods.

While Choi pointed out ChatGPT could prove to be a boon if students and peers used it intentionally. Choi used it to write code for the paper's statistics and graphs, and said it worked "VERY well," noting it "produced simple code that would be tedious to write (e.g. bootstrapping p-values, creating graph grids)."

The bot developed by the US company OpenAI, which uses AI to generate streams of text from simple prompts, received massive funding from Microsoft.