New study reveals: Is ChatGPT or students better at writing?

ChatGPT is being used by millions of students all over the world, but is it actually better than what the students can produce on their own?

Do you remember?

Remember the year 2022? It was the year, the World’s population reached eight billion, the Omicron variant of Covid-19 sweeped the globe and OpenAI launched ChatGPT.

AI is here to stay

Since the launch of ChatGPT, it has become an integrated part of everyday life for millions of people around the world – understandable, as AI is probably here to stay.

But is it better?

Students all over the world use the platform to everything from writing applications, checking their spelling, translating texts and even writing essay for them. But this raises an important question: Is ChatGPT actually as good, er even better, than the students themselves?

ChatGPT vs Students

A team of researchers from the University of East Anglia (UK) decided to put it to the test by having students write their own texts and then comparing them to the results produced by ChatGPT – and the results speak for themselves.

145 students vs 1 AI

The researchers compared the essays written by 145 real students to the essays produced by ChatGPT. They compared the essays on several parameters such as coherency, grammatical skills and personal touch.

And the Winner is …

According to the researchers, the AI-produced essays were impressive regarding coherence and grammatical sound, but it laked one very important thing: Personal touch.

Facilitating cheating?

Professor Ken Hyland from UEA’s School of Education and Lifelon Learning, said: “The Fear is that ChatGPT and other AI Writing tools potentially facilitate cheating and may weaken core literazy and critical thinking (…) In response to these concers, we wanted to see how closely AI mimic human essay writing.”

Engagement Markers

Prof Hyland continued: “We were particularly interested ind looking at what we called ‘engagement markers’ like questions and personal commentary.” And this is were the real students excelled compared to the AI.

AI was fluent, but impersonal

The researchers found a large array of rhetorical questions, direct appeals to the reader and loads of other engangement strategies in the essays by the real students. The AI on the other hand was linguistically fluent, but impersonal. and less engaging.

AI can still play a crucial part

So as of 2025, essays written by real students seem to outclass essays written by AI, but this does not mean AI should be banned from education. Instead it should be used as teaching aids rather than shortcuts.

This study was led by UEA in collaboration with Prof Kevin Jiang of Jilin University, China.

‘Does ChatGPT write like a student? Engagement markers in argumentative essays’ is published in the journal Written Communication.