A college education historically has been seen as method of moving upward with regards to income brackets and social status. Indeed, many colleges recognize this connection and seek to enroll talented low income students. While these students might have their education, books, room, and board paid; there are other items that they might be expected to use that are not part of most college scholarship packages. One of those items that has recently surfaced is access to generative AI platforms. The most popular of these platforms is ChatGPT, and it has a paid version (ChatGPT4) and a free version (ChatGPT3.5). We seek to explore differences in the free and paid versions in the context of homework questions and data analyses as might be seen in a typical introductory statistics course. We determine the extent to which students who cannot afford newer and faster versions of generative AI programs would be disadvantaged in terms of writing such projects and learning these methods.

翻译：高等教育历来被视为提升收入阶层与社会地位的重要途径。许多高校确实认识到这一关联，并致力于招收有才华的低收入学生。尽管这些学生的学费、教材费、住宿与膳食费用可能已获资助，但仍有一些预期使用的资源未被纳入多数大学奖学金计划。近期浮现的其中一项资源便是生成式人工智能平台的访问权限。当前最流行的此类平台是ChatGPT，其包含付费版本（ChatGPT4）与免费版本（ChatGPT3.5）。本研究旨在探讨免费版与付费版在典型统计学入门课程所涉及的作业题目与数据分析任务中的表现差异。我们将评估无法负担更新、更快速生成式AI程序的学生，在完成此类项目与学习相关方法时可能面临的劣势程度。