Little Impact of ChatGPT on High School Test Scores

Nick Huntington-Klein

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: In educational settings, AI can be used as a learning aid, but can also be used to avoid schoolwork, passing classes while learning little. Most existing evidence on AI's educational impact comes from trials of supervised instructor-encouraged AI usage, rather than on unsupervised usage which is of the most concern. This paper uses the dropoff in ChatGPT activity during non-school summer months to identify areas with heavy educational AI use, and then estimates the effect of that usage on aggregate United States high school test scores. Areas with higher educational AI use were not significantly different from other areas, with an insignificant effect estimated to be close to zero, and in the preferred specification bounded below roughly 0.04 standard deviations of test score performance in absolute terms.

Date: 2026-05, Revised 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain and nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.08812 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2605.08812

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().