In my early years of college, I had to work hard to develop my studying skills. Too often in high school, I would stubbornly refuse to go above and beyond and my consistent B’s would prove to be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I am glad to have passed all of my classes but in doing so, I never learned how to study efficiently. With the help of some great mentors, I found the best way of studying for me was to take practice exams. Trying to memorize a textbook works well for some, but practice questions helped me realize which topics I knew well and which topics I needed to study more. However, this technique does come with a key flaw; practice exams are tough to come by. In my university in particular, exams were treated like top secret classified documents. During an exam, phones were not permitted and those who left to use the restroom were followed and monitored by proctors. After an exam was finished, the professors would collect them and they would never be seen or spoken of again. I did not have much luck searching for practice exams online either. The vast majority were locked behind expensive paywalls and those that were free were either poorly scanned or filled with absurdly simple questions. Fortunately, my luck took a turn for the better following the rise of Open AI.
ChatGPT has the incredible ability to answer questions and complete requests by scouring the internet for a solution in a matter of seconds. By simply asking ChatGPT to create some practice exam questions, I had found the key to my greatest issue. It’s even possible to customize the question by adding more details such as course name, grade level, etc. A real-life example is the following: “Can you create a college level environmental toxicology exam focused on risk management?” By asking ChatGPT this simple question, in the blink of an eye, I have 10 open-ended practice questions. Although ChatGPT is known to make mistakes, asking it for the answers to the generated questions is a great help. The only disadvantage is that ChatGPT only creates open ended questions which obviously aren’t ideal for the multiple choice portion of exams. However, this hasn’t been a problem for me as I the open-ended nature of the questions tend to dive into the information covered in the multiple choice portion of exams.