How to Use ChatGPT to Study (and When It Will Hurt Your Grade)

ChatGPT is the best explainer most students have ever had access to and the worst study partner, at the same time. Used one way it will raise your grade. Used the other way it will quietly lower it, and you will not find out until the exam. Here is the difference, with the exact prompts, and the one thing it cannot know about your class.

The good way: make it ask you

The research on studying is clear that answering questions beats reading answers. Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) rated practice testing as a high-utility technique and rereading as low. ChatGPT defaults to the low one: you ask, it explains, you nod. Flip it.

1. Quiz me. Paste your notes or slides and say: "Write ten short-answer questions on this. Ask one at a time. Do not give me the answer until I try."
2. Grade me, then explain. "Here is my answer. Tell me what is wrong with it before you tell me the right one."
3. Explain it three ways. When a concept will not land: "Explain this as if I am a first year, then with a worked example, then tell me the most common way students get it wrong."
4. Find my gap. "Here is my explanation of X in my own words. What did I leave out or get backwards?"
5. Make it harder. After you get a question right: "Ask me a version of that an exam would use to trick me."

The bad way: let it do the thinking

• Pasting the homework and copying the answer. The grade for a problem set is the learning while you do it. Skip the doing and the exam collects the debt.
• Asking for a summary instead of reading. A summary is rereading with the hard parts removed. You will recognize everything and recall nothing.
• Trusting a confident answer. It is often right. It is sometimes wrong in a way that sounds exactly like being right. Check anything that matters against your textbook or your lecture.
• Writing the essay. Beyond the integrity problem, which is real and which varies by school, the essay is the thinking. A paper you did not write is a paper you cannot defend, and professors ask.

The thing ChatGPT cannot know

It was not in the room. Your professor said, in the fourth week, that in this course you discount at half years, or that the textbook's definition is the one they will not accept, or that the final is all short answer. ChatGPT gives you the textbook version of everything, and the textbook version is sometimes the one that loses points in your class. I have caught this in my own classes more than once; the story is in how to get a 4.0 GPA in college.

The fix is to give it your class. Paste the relevant slide or the part of the transcript before you ask, and say "answer from this, and tell me if it disagrees with the general version." That works, and it is tedious, and by week six most people stop. This is the gap that class-based study tools fill. Availa, which I make, keeps every lecture and deck from a class together, so when you ask a question it answers from your professor's words and shows the slide or the minute it came from. It is a narrower tool than ChatGPT and that is the point. The broader comparison is in best AI study tools for college.

A study session with ChatGPT that actually works

1. Paste the slides from one lecture. Ask for ten questions, one at a time, no answers.
2. Answer each from memory. Get graded. Note the misses.
3. For each miss, ask for a three-way explanation, then explain it back in your own words and ask what you got wrong.
4. Two days later, paste the same slides and ask for ten new questions on the same material. Compare.
5. Anything that contradicts what your professor said, the professor wins. Check the lecture.

Common questions

Is using ChatGPT to study cheating?

Using it to quiz and explain is studying, and almost no school objects. Using it to produce work you submit as your own is a different question with a different answer at every school. Read your syllabus and ask if it is unclear.

Is ChatGPT accurate enough to study from?

For explaining a standard concept, usually. For a specific fact, a dose, a date, a formula your professor uses differently, check it. Treat it like a smart classmate who did not do the reading.

Should I use ChatGPT or a study app?

Both do different jobs. ChatGPT explains anything on demand. A study app built around your classes knows what your professor covered and brings it back on a schedule. Most students end up with one of each.