# ChatGPT in Computer Science Education: A Case Study on a Database Administration Course
## 4 Discussion  
RQ1. How Widespread Is the Use of ChatGPT Among Students to Learn Database Administration, and What Is the Perceived Reliability and Usefulness of This Educational Resource Compared to Other Traditional Resources? The results reported for the presented case study (see Table 3) indicate that ChatGPT usage is moderate (3.13 out of 5), but it narrowly outperforms other traditional resources such as MySQL official documentation (2.20), and Stack Overflow posts or googling (2.43) in solving practical database management problems. This result is striking considering that in a similar case study conducted one year ago [42], ChatGPT was less used than the aforementioned resources. This indicates, in line with other previous studies [1,2], that GenAI tools are becoming increasingly widespread in education and the field of computer science education is no exception. However, the use of ChatGPT is not too extensive compared to the resource most used by the students: the report that they themselves had prepared during the practical sessions (4.45 out of 5). This report is the result of their work in the practical classes for weeks during which, in addition to the aforementioned resources, they also had the support of the teacher (providing step-by-step tutorials and resolving individual inquiries) and their colleagues in the practice group to solve practical problems as they arose. Regarding the reliability of the digital resources used, it should be noted that the students perceived ChatGPT (3.39 out of 5) as less reliable than the tutorials provided by the teacher (4.16), MySQL official documentation (4.00), or their own report (4.63). This is to be expected, as ChatGPT itself warns you that its answers may not be true, and it is common to make ChatGPT (especially the free version 3.5, the one that the students used) fall into hallucinations leading to wrong answers [43]. Despite this, the students considered ChatGPT to be more useful (3.55 out of 5) than teacher tutorials (3.36), MySQL official documentation (3.04), and Stack Overflow or googling (3.00). This is understandable since the use of the other tools requires digging into the information and looking for an answer that ChatGPT can give you directly if you ask it properly. Nevertheless, the most useful resource for the students is the report they prepared during the classes before the exam (4.50). Furthermore, it is interesting to explore the specific usage of ChatGPT to solve database administration problems (see Figure 1): 80% of the students declared that they used this tool and used it mainly to look for alternatives or improvements to certain SQL statements, to solve problems with a SQL statement, and to know about the syntax or examples of certain SQL statements. For example, ChatGPT proved to be quite useful for students who wanted to learn details about SQL statements for creating users or granting permissions but it was not very useful to identify the SQL statements necessary to load information in a MySQL database from an MS Excel or an XML file or to solve problems during the loading process, such as incompatibility between the character set of the data. In these cases, the