Journal of African Development

The appearance of AI tools has raised immense interest and utter concern among teachers and researchers of diverse fields of expertise in higher education. Much has been said about the pros and cons of using artificial intelligence tools in education and in different areas of knowledge.  In fact, throughout the last three or four years, AI tools like Chat GPT and Gemini are being introduced to design materials and to compare students´ and machine performances.  Nevertheless, nobody knows for sure whether AI tools can perform better, the same as or worse than students in tailored- made exams of English for Academic and Specific Purposes at university.  For such reason, a test on reading comprehension with instructions in Spanish was administered for BA students of distance education at UNICEN and then uploaded and solved by two IA tools.  Their responses were compared qualitatively, considering their answers to both close and open questions.  In this piece of research, we exemplify how students´ and these tools have solved the instructions provided.  The preliminary results show that students´ answers might be more related to their current practices in daily life and may also result in more thorough analysis in certain questions.  Yet, AI tools provide answers which are convincing and accurate as well. Even though these results might not be conclusive, the exams for BA distance education students need to be changed urgently.  These results also suggest that teachers´ role is and will be crucial when designing evaluation tools from now onwards.