gms | German Medical Science

Research question/objective: Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly important in our society, academia, and medicine. The widespread usage of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, which rose to popularity in late 2022, has carried on into university contexts and, with this, to students and learners as well. As such, higher education is now facing drastic impact from language AIs such as ChatGPT. In the competitive nature of a medical curriculum, it is to be expected that medical students utilize the new generative AI software available. Thus, the potential impact of this usage on assessments and grades will be of special interest going forward. Here, we aim to address the following research question: How does the use of AI software influence the subjective academic performance of medical students?

Methods: This study will be carried out among medical students across all years (1-6) at the Medical University of Vienna. We devised a 36-item questionnaire to assess the impact of the use of generative AI on medical students. The questionnaire is structured into three sections: demographic information, questions about AI use, and questions about subjective academic performance. We use both qualitative and quantitative questions. The invitation to participate in the survey will be disseminated to students via email. An electronic version of the questionnaire will be accessible through the university’s student portal website. Data will be extracted from the survey and analyzed via IBM^® SPSS^® software.

Results: The questionnaire has been submitted for review to the data protection committee of the Medical University of Vienna. We plan to commence the survey in March 2024, with the aim to collect 200-300 responses by the end of May 2024. Data preparation and analysis will commence in June 2024, and the results curated to present at the conference.

Discussion: This study will give an overview of how the emergence of AI chatbots impacts academic performance in the medical curriculum, from the subjective viewpoint of medical students. We hope to gain insight into how AI is received among the students, and be able to assess its influence on their overall academic confidence.

Take home message: This work will demonstrate the impact of the use of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, on medical students’ subjective academic performance.