3.2M Records Show Proctored Math Scores Fell From 80% to 60% After ChatGPT
thisdudelikesAI · x · 2026-09-03
A UC Irvine PhD student, Sina Rismanchian, partnered with McGraw Hill researchers to analyze 3.2 million practice records from ALEKS, a math platform used by millions, spanning ten years around ChatGPT's arrival.
- Design: The platform naturally splits into word problems (pasteable into a chatbot) and graphing problems (must be done inside the software). Same students, same courses, two kinds of friction.
- Behavior shift: After ChatGPT, time on word problems collapsed — 31% less for high schoolers, 27% less for college students, while fifth graders barely moved.
- Diverging scores: Unsupervised practice scores went up, but proctored placement-test accuracy on similar items fell from 80% historically to 60% — a 25% drop in odds of a correct answer. Graphing performance didn't fall, ruling out general skill decline.
- Mechanism: Math skill is built in the minutes spent choosing a setup, guessing wrong, and fixing it. When the model hands you the path, you submit an answer but skip the part that turns exposure into memory.
- Implication: The author warns this likely extends to any task where the hard part can be pasted into a box — assume some learning is being copied away with it.
More from AGI Musings
- Consciousness Experts Clash in Nature Over Whether AI Could Ever Be Conscious — anilkseth · 2026-10-21
- Polymarket puts just 7% odds on OpenAI pausing AI training this year — Polymarket · 2026-10-21
- AI agents are overwhelming Gmail's spam filter, researcher warns — LuizaJarovsky · 2026-10-21
- Daniel Lemire: AI-generated papers are exposing academia's 'Profzi scheme' — lemire · 2026-10-21
- Universities block thesis downloads while each dissertation averages barely a handful of lifetime reads — generativist · 2026-10-21
- Berkeley wins Schmidt Sciences HAVI grant to decode whale and parrot communication with AI — begusgasper · 2026-10-21