These Are the 100 ChatGPT Prompts Created by College Students

What kind of prompts are college students plugging into ChatGPT these days? A new list of 100 AI prompts created by college students who collaborated through OpenAI’s remote lab offers a window into exactly that.

The prompts, which were shared and voted on by 70 college students, are organized into three categories — study, career, and life — and show the students asking ChatGPT to perform roles ranging from a study buddy to a career counselor or even a lawyer.

OpenAI said students from over 50 universities, including Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State, UCLA, BYU, and Washington University in St. Louis, participated in the weekly group discussions. The entire list of participants, who were selected through an application process, is available here.

Other times, the prompts are incredibly short and simple, such as asking for synonyms for “sophisticated.” They can also veer into more heady territory, such as when one student asked the chatbot to deduce their “true goals in life.”

Then, there’s the practical — such as asking ChatGPT to “pre-game the dining hall menu” and develop a meal plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that’s healthy, high in protein, and includes fruits and vegetables.

“Earlier this year, we invited 70 students into the ChatGPT Lab to swap their best chats,” Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, wrote Wednesday on X. “Together they tested, refined, and voted on the most useful chats, and today we’re sharing their top 100 for students everywhere.”

Many of the prompts — you can see the entire list here — seem to fit within OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s goal of creating an AI that has a Ph. D.-level expertise that can be relied on to answer a variety of questions, though we would be curious what their professors would say about the results.

Here are a few of the prompts from each category that stood out. If you click through the prompt on the site, it opens up ChatGPT and plugs it in so you can try it out yourself.

Study prompts

Career prompts

Life prompts

As students use AI, educators adapt

The study prompts, in particular, demonstrate that students are increasingly looking to AI to help them save time in their studies.

While AI can be used to help students digest and understand information, college students who previously spoke to Business Insider voiced conflicting feelings about their use of the tech, with some worried about developing an overreliance.

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As some colleges embrace the technology and create AI degrees, teachers are grappling with how to navigate a new learning landscape. Some are banning AI use in the classroom. Others say they’re relying more on in-person tests and handwritten papers that are harder to game with ChatGPT.

Classroom assignments are also evolving. Business Insider previously spoke with a lecturer whose college had developed an in-house system to detect how difficult it might be for someone to use AI to cheat on a specific assignment.