ChatGPT has recently gathered attention from the general public and academia as a tool that is able to generate plausible and human-sounding text answers to various questions. One potential use, or abuse, of ChatGPT is in answering various questions or even generating whole essays and research papers in an academic or classroom setting. While recent works have explored the use of ChatGPT in the context of humanities, business school, or medical school, this work explores how ChatGPT performs in the context of an introductory computer engineering course. This work assesses ChatGPT's aptitude in answering quizzes, homework, exam, and laboratory questions in an introductory-level computer engineering course. This work finds that ChatGPT can do well on questions asking about generic concepts. However, predictably, as a text-only tool, it cannot handle questions with diagrams or figures, nor can it generate diagrams and figures. Further, also clearly, the tool cannot do hands-on lab experiments, breadboard assembly, etc., but can generate plausible answers to some laboratory manual questions. One of the key observations presented in this work is that the ChatGPT tool could not be used to pass all components of the course. Nevertheless, it does well on quizzes and short-answer questions. On the other hand, plausible, human-sounding answers could confuse students when generating incorrect but still plausible answers.

翻译：ChatGPT最近引起公众和学术界的关注，因其能针对各类问题生成逼真且类似人类回答的文本。在学术或课堂环境中，ChatGPT的一种潜在用途或滥用是回答各种问题，甚至生成完整的论文和研究报告。虽然近期研究已探索ChatGPT在人文学科、商学院或医学院中的应用，但本研究聚焦于ChatGPT在计算机工程入门课程中的表现。本文评估了ChatGPT在回答入门级计算机工程课程中的小测验、作业、考试和实验室问题方面的能力。研究发现，ChatGPT在处理涉及通用概念的问题时表现良好。然而，可预见的是，作为纯文本工具，它无法处理包含图表或图形的问题，也不能生成图表和图形。此外，该工具显然无法进行动手实验、面包板组装等操作，但能为部分实验室手册问题生成看似合理的答案。本研究的关键观察之一是，ChatGPT工具无法通过该课程的所有组成部分。尽管如此，它在小测验和简答题上表现良好。另一方面，当生成错误但看似合理的答案时，这些逼真的人类化回答可能使学生产生困惑。