Students solve Dafny verification exercises significantly better with ChatGPT, but the benefit depends on prompt quality and including full program context.
Do AI assistants help students write formal specifications? A study with ChatGPT and the B-Method
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abstract
This paper investigates the role of AI assistants, specifically OpenAI's ChatGPT, in teaching formal methods (FM) to undergraduate students, using the B-method as a formal specification technique. While existing studies demonstrate the effectiveness of AI in coding tasks, no study reports on its impact on formal specifications. We examine whether ChatGPT provides an advantage when writing B-specifications and analyse student trust in its outputs. Our findings indicate that the AI does not help students to enhance the correctness of their specifications, with low trust correlating to better outcomes. Additionally, we identify a behavioural pattern with which to interact with ChatGPT which may influence the correctness of B-specifications.
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cs.SE 1years
2025 1verdicts
CONDITIONAL 1representative citing papers
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Can Large Language Models Help Students Prove Software Correctness? An Experimental Study with Dafny
Students solve Dafny verification exercises significantly better with ChatGPT, but the benefit depends on prompt quality and including full program context.