No, not “ChatGPT, write me an essay that will get an A+ on why Lady Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most interesting villain.”
While they’ve undoubtedly complicated the world of plagiarism in the 21st century, ChatGPT and other natural-language AI assistants have also shown they’re capable of being very powerful, legitimate study aids.
The difference between getting AI to do your study for you (bad) and getting it to help you study more effectively (good) is all in the prompts.
Prompts are the natural-language (as opposed to computer language) instructions that tell the AI what we want it to do. As with any form of communication, the more precise and specific the instructions that we use, the more likely we will get the results we want.
Here are five prompts that can quickly help anyone to understand how they work, as well as how they should start to think about structuring their own useful prompts.
Create A Study Plan
This prompt will create a study plan for any subject that helps you learn at your own pace.
Prompt: Please create a personalized study plan for me. First, ask me questions one at a time to understand my requirements. When you have enough information, generate a study plan for the relevant time period, with specific learning objectives, areas of study, practical or theoretical exercises and guidance toward learning resources for each study session. Include practice and review sessions to reinforce learning.
Simplify A Complex Concept
If there’s an idea or concept related to your field of study that you just can’t get your head around, you can get ChatGPT to simplify it so you can!
Prompt: Can you please explain [concept] as if you were teaching it to a 12-year-old? Use simple analogies and relatable examples, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. If necessary, break down the explanation into smaller, easy-to-digest parts and summarize the key idea in one short sentence at the end.
Generate A Mock Exam
To help you understand the categories of questions that might come up and prepare for them:
Prompt: Generate a mock exam paper for a student sitting an exam. First, ask them what exam they are taking, then create a mock paper as close as possible to the one they need to practice for.
Create A Primer
When jumping head-first into a new subject or even developing a new skill, this will give you what you need to get a head-start:
Prompt: Create a beginner-friendly primer on [insert subject/skill]. Include an introduction, and overview of the key concepts that are important to this course of study, give practical examples of its impact, value or relevance to the world, and list the 10 key facts anyone wanting to study this subject should know.
Quiz Me
GenAI chatbots can always be ready with a quick quiz to test how close you are to mastery of a topic:
Prompt: Please create 10 questions to test my knowledge of [subject]. Ask me the questions one at a time. At the end, report my score, and then, for each incorrect question, provide an explanation of why I was wrong. For each correct question, provide further useful or interesting information to encourage further study on the subject of the question.
Feedback On And Improve An Essay
No, you can’t get your AI to write your essay unless you want to get kicked off the course. But you can use it to review your work, estimate a grade and suggest how it can be improved:
Prompt: Please critically evaluate and review this essay, written for my [name of qualification] course. Please evaluate it for content accuracy and how well it addresses the central themes that are important to the essay. Give me a predicted grade for the essay and then simple, bullet-pointed suggestions for improving this grade. [insert essay text]
How To Make Even Better Prompts:
These are just examples designed to help you think about how prompts work.
I believe learning how to communicate with and instruct machines effectively will be an increasingly vital skill for almost all professionals and leaders as time moves on.
You can easily use these prompts as jumping-off points to make new ones better suited to your own particular requirements. You’ll quickly get a grasp of what works and what doesn’t.
A good next step is learning how to provide your own data to the AI to get more accurate results and greater personalization. Good luck.
