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Using ChatGPT to Tanscribe Homework

 This... is interesting.

The oldest kid here is taking Calc III, The Calculus of Multiple Variables. There's a whole thing every week where she winds up spending a lot of time transcribing her homework into a more readable form so that she can turn in her work on the assignment's due date. I wondered if an LLM could help with that.

I tried out ChatGPT 5.3 with this picture to start. Believe it or not, this contians two homework problem, (and, accidentally, my foot.)


I asked 

"Please write these two math solutions as laTeX and write them to a pdf file."

I wasn't too surprised when it replied with 

---------

"I only have one photo so far, and parts of it are too hard to read reliably to typeset without guessing.

From the visible top portion, I can make out a problem that looks like

T(x,y)=601+x2+y2T(x,y)=\frac{60}{1+x^2+y^2}

with partial derivatives like

∂T∂x=−120x(1+x2+y2)2,∂T∂y=−120y(1+x2+y2)2\frac{\partial T}{\partial x}=\frac{-120x}{(1+x^2+y^2)^2},\qquad \frac{\partial T}{\partial y}=\frac{-120y}{(1+x^2+y^2)^2}

and evaluation at (2,1)(2,1), but the rest of the page is too ambiguous to trust.

Please upload the second solution, and ideally a clearer photo of this first one taken straight-on with better lighting. Once you do, I’ll turn both into LaTeX and give you a PDF."

--------

Note: ChatGPT exposed a bias in it's answer. Do you know how many times I've told the kid to use a new sheet of paper for every solution???

I cropped the picture and tried again with a bit more specific insructions.

I asked,

"Try this. Only go with the gold text that isn't obvously scratched out on the top. The second problem is on the bottom half of the page and is blue and not obviously scratched out."

And voila!



A fun research note

Here's a screen capture of ChatGPT's first transcription attempt


Note that the line 

"∂x∂T​=(1+x2+y2)2−120x​,∂y∂T​=(1+x2+y2)2−120y"

shown in the first answer above, isn't there. That came in with copy/paste. It wasn't visible on the ChatGPT web page.


Videos



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