Higher Education in the Age of AI: Chatgpt’s Impact on Students’ Academic Activities

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, higher education institutions must adapt accordingly by smoothly transforming their curricula and pedagogical approaches in a student-centered perspective that allows young adults to develop the necessary skillset of AI competences that will ensure them employability in the near future. After the 2022 launch of Open AI’s notorious ChatGPT, higher education settings have also faced the urgent need to both regulate and integrate gen AI platforms mainly because their students were already taking advantage of its benefits in terms of generating idea or producing high-quality writing papers. Even though several studies have documented GPT’s impact on students’ skills, there is limited focus on students’ perceptions in Romanian higher education. Hence, the main aim of the present study is to investigate students’ perception with regards to their perceived influence of generative AI use for academic purposes on their academic performance. The methodological approach taken in this study is a mixed methodology based on a pilot study (n=186), with data being gathered via a questionnaire-based survey and analysed via SPSS. Findings suggest that GPT improves several research skills of students, while 71% of respondents perceiving GPT’s impact as significantly improving their productivity, thus this article adding a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge. Future studies could enhance representativeness, mitigate self-reported bias, and improve econometric model predictive power.