Examining the Efficacy of ChatGPT in Marking Short-Answer Assessments in an Undergraduate Medical Program

Abstract

Traditional approaches to marking short-answer questions face limitations in timeliness, scalability, inter-rater reliability, and faculty time costs. Harnessing generative artificial intelligence (AI) to address some of these shortcomings is attractive. This study aims to validate the use of ChatGPT for evaluating short-answer assessments in an undergraduate medical program. Ten questions from the pre-clerkship medical curriculum were randomly chosen, and for each, six previously marked student answers were collected. These sixty answers were evaluated by ChatGPT in July 2023 under four conditions: with both a rubric and standard, with only a standard, with only a rubric, and with neither. ChatGPT displayed good Spearman correlations with a single human assessor (r = 0.6–0.7, p p 2 = 0.33). Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT is a viable, though imperfect, assistant to human assessment, performing comparably to a single expert assessor. This study serves as a foundation for future research on AI-based assessment techniques with potential for further optimization and increased reliability.

Keywords

• ChatGPT
• artificial intelligence
• short-answer assessment
• automated grading
• generative AI
• undergraduate medical education