When OpenAI first released Custom GPTs I found it as an opportunity to make fit for purpose versions of ChatGPT that I could use without needing to always develop a large, elaborate prompt. I made a couple for my personal use in my teaching and it seemed to come along alright.
I then wandered up into our Science staffroom and it was right around the time that our staff were getting ready to administer their data tests across the four Science disciplines that we offer; Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Agricultural Science. Our tasks were already endorsed for the next year so we didn’t have too much work that needed to be done on that front, but a comment was made about the appitite that our students have for practice tests so that they can prepare for the real deal. I thought to myself that there was probably an instance where if we could get the Custom GPT right, it would start to reduce the workload of our staff as well as giving our students a way of developing practice tests for themselves.
Off to work I went, trying to get the prompt building done right so that we could very easily get the output that matched the syllabus requirements along with being in a format that made it easy for both students and teachers to implement.
Now the biggest issue I faced here (and still do in terms of maintaining them) is that I’m not a Science teacher. So I rely on feedback from other staff to let me know if there are some issues. I’ll need to update them heading into next year so that I can make sure that they match any changes to the new 2025 syllabi. I’ve also since been contacted about developing similar GPTs for the Psychology and Marine Science subjects.
Unfortunately, at the time of creating these GPT didn’t have the ability to develop graphs, but it should output some data in a table, when chatting with one of our Chem/Physics teachers he mentioned that he would just pull that data into Excel and create any graphs he needed.
As a non-science teacher I can’t really speak for the complete accuracy of the data, however I was told that the purpose was more about getting students to make judgements/commentary about the data/information provided to them in the data test, so any purists may have issues with the data outputted (sorry!). We worked towards having these as practice tests or tasks for students to complete rather than replacing the IA development. If you are getting output that doesn’t match with your content context, just provide a prompt in the box rather than clicking the quick access button.
I have found from time to time the GPT can output something completely incorrect, in that instance I’d just ignore that output and try again! It is frustrating but in the end I think you will get there and it will help those along the way in saving time.
For those that aren’t ChatGPT users my understanding is that free users can still use Custom GPTs but only while they haven’t exceeded their usage of the latest model (I’m unsure what that limit is at this time as I use a paid account).
It has been interesting to see the uptake of these as I never really thought of it to by anything more than something for my school, they’ve since been shared widely across Queensland with more than 250 uses of the Biology Data Test generator on its own! I guess I was hesitant about publishing them widely mostly because I wasn’t entirely sure of the accuracy and didn’t want to send a wide audience down the garden path with something that was a little bit crap.
Anyway, after a little bit of work, I got to here with published versions of each of the GPTs:
- Chemistry Data Test GPT
- Physics Data Test GPT
- Biology Data Test GPT
- Agricultural Science Data Test GPT
- Psychology Data Test GPT
- Marine Science: Under Development
If they are of any use, feel free to use away!
