The 2023 SATs were a frustrating experience for Year 6 students, as they faced one of the most demanding tests of the last few years. Multiple articles emerged about children heading home in tears, as the math tests unexpectedly challenged them with time management and hard questions.
To investigate whether the test was too hard for the year it was created for, online learning platform Atom Learning asked AI ChatGPT to solve the same arithmetic and reasoning questions the students solved, which the government made public briefly after the test days.
Oout of 36 arithmetic questions for a total of 40 points, the AI managed to solve 32, totalling 34 points, which corresponds to 85% of the test. For the reasoning questions, the AI cracked 18 out of 25 questions, totalling 24 out of 35 points, corresponding to 68.6%.
A spokesperson for Atom Learning said: “It’s interesting and worrying at the same time that 10 to 11-year-olds were handed a test that not even an Artificial Intelligence has managed to complete to its fullest.”
“While we’re aware that AIs such as ChatGPT are not infallible, it’s important to remember how these questions were supposed to be tailored for Year 6 students, which would make anyone suppose that they ought to be ‘easy’ questions for the likes of adults and computers. However, in a situation in which not even an AI can find answers to what is supposed to be basic math, it’s hard to imagine how young students felt when these same questions were put in front of them on one of the most important days of their lives as school children.”
“Therefore, it’s now easier to understand the reactions that many of them had, which is to be added to the very little time they had to complete the tests: the Maths Paper 1 (Arithmetic) was to be completed in 30 minutes, while the Maths Paper 2 (Reasoning) in 40 minutes. This means that children had 50 seconds per question for the arithmetic test and about 72 seconds per question for the reasoning one, given the time they had to take to read and understand each question, as well as the anxiety and stress any student faces on a test day.”
