# Can an AI Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz? An AI Grand Challenge for Education

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [Making Monolingual Sentence Embeddings Multilingual using Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09813/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Direct-Answer Question Answering? Try ARC-DA, the Direct-Answer AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03315/) (2021)
- [Semantic Answer Similarity for Evaluating Question Answering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06130/) (2021)
- [AI-Powered Learning: Making Education Accessible, Affordable, and Achievable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01908/) (2020)
- [Kwame for Science: An AI Teaching Assistant Based on Sentence-BERT for Science Education in West Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13703/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Towards an AI to Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04333/) (2023)
- [Brilla AI: AI Contestant for the National Science and Maths Quiz](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01699/) (2024)
- [Leveraging AI to Advance Science and Computing Education across Africa: Challenges, Progress and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07397/) (2024)
- [NSMQ Riddles: A Benchmark of Scientific and Mathematical Riddles for Quizzing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07051/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a lack of enough qualified teachers across Africa which hampers efforts to provide adequate learning support such as educational question answering (EQA) to students. An AI system that can enable students to ask questions via text or voice and get instant answers will make high-quality education accessible. Despite advances in the field of AI, there exists no robust benchmark or challenge to enable building such an (EQA) AI within the African context. Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) is the perfect competition to evaluate the potential of such an AI due to its wide coverage of scientific fields, variety of question types, highly competitive nature, and live, real-world format. The NSMQ is a Jeopardy-style annual live quiz competition in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this position paper, we propose the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, an AI Grand Challenge for Education using Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) as a case study. Our proposed grand challenge is to "Build an AI to compete live in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win - performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition." We describe the competition, and key technical challenges to address along with ideas from recent advances in machine learning that could be leveraged to solve this challenge. This position paper is a first step towards conquering such a challenge and importantly, making advances in AI for education in the African context towards democratizing high-quality education across Africa.