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.Comment: 6 page