Training teachers to develop higher cognitive levels to address complex teaching challenges is necessary. Artificial intelligence (e.g., ChatGPT) holds the potential to assist in teacher education. Teacher qualification examination serves as a threshold for certifying pre-service teachers’ abilities in pursuing teacher education curricula. Analyzing the distribution of cognitive levels in examination questions and assessing the performance of artificial intelligence tools in answering these questions is necessary to explore their potential in aiding teaching assistance. This study selected 560 education professional examination questions from the elementary school teacher qualification examination between 2019 and 2022. We used the revised Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy to analyze and categorize questions into high and low cognitive levels. We investigated the ChatGPT scores in the relevant subject areas and compared the differences in score distribution between high and low cognitive levels across different subjects and question types using box plots. The results indicate that the percentage of low-order questions in all three subjects was higher than that of high-order questions in the teacher qualification examination of education professional subjects. The proportion of high-order comprehensive questions has increased to 81.67% to meet the competence-oriented assessment requirements. The percentage for multiple-choice questions remains relatively low at only 6.55%. This indicates a need to increase the proportion of high-order questions. Furthermore, ChatGPT achieved an average total score of 72.73 points in the education professional subjects, surpassing the threshold of an average score of 60 points for the teacher qualification examination. However, there was significant variability in its performance on high-order questions. This suggests that ChatGPT can potentially become an assistive tool for teacher education. However, educators must consider developing critical thinking skills in high-order cognitive contexts when using such tools.