How I use ChatGPT as a tutor to enhance my studies

In academia today, many professors and teachers face the huge question of how to deal with artificial intelligence in the classroom. Many students use it, often unethically, to replace their own effort. Rather than replacing hard work, however, it can serve as an effective tutor—one that helps clarify complex ideas, break down dense topics, and refine study techniques.

Use AI to review your work and explain mistakes

It can often happen that you take a quiz or exam, get a grade, and have almost no explanation as to why something is wrong. Similarly, you may have homework that you have completed to the best of your ability and need a second opinion – depending on your school’s policy on using AI on homework.

In both of these cases, AI can review your completed work and diagnose where you’re right and how you might have gone wrong, when knowing your grade alone might not help much. For paper tasks, ChatGPT can generally analyze and understand photos quite well. Regardless of how you upload an issue for review, your prompt should provide some context.

For example, below I took a picture of a math problem and used the prompt:

photo solution to a math problem” src=”https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/chatgpt-providing-a-solution-from-a-photo-of-a-math-problem.jpg” style=”display:block;height:auto;max-width:100%;”/>

ChatGPT is surprisingly capable of solving mathematical problems as well as more qualitative problems. Although his solutions occasionally make mistakes, he generally provides more than enough insight to check the work, especially if you already know what the correct answer should be.

Provide tailored explanations of concepts

In addition to checking the correctness of your work, you can ask for highly customized explanations of complicated concepts. Prompts like the ones below can provide context for your level of understanding of the topic and the type of explanation that would be most helpful:

Additionally, you can provide AI reference materials such as copying and pasting an article or uploading a PDF. Here are other examples of challenges:

• “Explain [concept] like I’m 5. Use the text below as another link.”
• “Act as if you were a peer mentor to a college student and explain [concept]. Please use the attached document as a reference.”
• “If I want to learn [concept] ASAP, what study plan would you recommend?”

AI tools like ChatGPT are already useful for analyzing research and notes, but their tutoring potential cannot be underestimated.

Check your writing

While tools like Grammarly provide real-time feedback, they often require an additional subscription. ChatGPT, on the other hand, allows post-write corrections at no additional cost. For example, you can use a prompt like the one below to check your typing to the extent that ChatGPT can.

You can further customize the prompt to provide feedback based on different roles. Instead of a PhD in English writing, you might want the help of a professional content writer or lab report expert. You can even explore how perspectives differ by asking, “How would a content writer’s critique differ from an English Ph.D. student’s critique of this writing?” I’ll use the first version of this article as an example – I actually ended up implementing a few of the suggestions, but I won’t tell you where!

This can be an iterative process that gets feedback from multiple perspectives on multiple designs. You may also prefer tools like Google NotebookLM for research-intensive writing. However, the ultimate goal should be to improve your own writing skills, as it is important to be able to critically evaluate what the AI ​​suggests.

AI is not perfect

In all these areas, AI remains imperfect and error-prone. With math problems, depending on the complexity, he still often makes mistakes. When it comes to writing, I find ChatGPT’s writing to be very generic and its suggestions can neutralize your unique voice. In my testing with math problems, the wrong answer appeared about 5-10% of the time for multiple choice problems. A human teacher remains useful as well. Furthermore, using these tools to help you study may tempt you to fully substitute your own efforts.

In academics, your own learning and growth is most important. AI can help you study and clear up the confusion, but your own efforts are a much better indicator of success than your use of AI! The key to using AI to improve learning is to use it to learn: ask for clarification and learn from its suggestions for your mistakes.