At 17, Muhammad Agha Nazih earned a perfect 100 in physics on Indonesia’s Academic Competency Test (TKA), according to the exam certificate he shared. To compete for public-university admission, many Indonesian students rely on private, commercial tutoring for entrance exams. From his home in Kudus, Agha chose instead to study independently, using ChatGPT to help him build his own prep approach.
He started earlier than most students, three months before the test. Each day, usually after his evening prayer session, Agha studied for two to three hours. He would write down his topic, time limit, and target, then review the material at the end of every session.
For each subject, Agha opened a fresh chat and gave ChatGPT a role, telling it to act as a physics tutor or university professor. After learning a topic from sources such as YouTube, he asked for ten multiple-choice questions that progressed from easy to hard. He solved them first himself, then asked ChatGPT for a clear, step-by-step solution using the right notation. When an answer looked wrong, he challenged it.
Many students he knows use AI to produce a finished story or final answer. But Agha used it to make himself do the work, because he knows that whoever does the work, does the learning. This involved new questions, tests of his understanding, and explanations tailored to where he got stuck. Before AI, a difficult problem could send him searching across many Google results. ChatGPT let him keep asking follow-up questions across fields as diverse as geometry, algebra, number theory, mechanics, and fluid mechanics.
A teacher introduced him to AI when he was 16, and its early answers often disappointed him. Over the next two years, he watched the reasoning improve. “It’s getting better and better,” he said. He still checks its work but now finds much less to criticize. He does not believe he would have earned that physics score without it.
His appetite for hard problems began in elementary school, when an earlier teacher introduced him to mathematics Olympiads. He chose math and kept competing through high school, placing second and fourth in district-level National Science Olympiad mathematics contests.
Now 18 and a recent high school graduate, Agha will leave Kudus for Yogyakarta to study actuarial science, using mathematics and statistics to understand risk. He hopes to become a professor in that subject. This summer, he is already practicing, by helping friends prepare for the entrance exams that could earn them a place in university, too, and teaching them the study method that helped him earn his own.
