The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) generate distractor answers for multiple‑choice questions (MCQs) by modeling student misconceptions. It introduces a learning‑science‑based taxonomy of reasoning strategies and applies it to LLM‑generated reasoning traces in math and science MCQs. The study finds that in math, LLMs often follow a misconception‑based process that can be diagnostically useful, whereas in science they rely more on semantic similarity, with frequent failures when the model cannot produce a correct solution or discards plausible distractors. Providing the correct solution in the prompt improves alignment with human distractors by 6.4%. "whyItMatters":"The findings show that anchoring distractor generation to the correct solution enhances LLM alignment with human‑authored distractors, underscoring the importance of correct‑answer cues in educational AI."
arXiv:2607. 14109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central challenges in natural language understanding.
arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.
arXiv:2606. 08988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Question Difficulty Estimation (AQDE) holds growing promise for educational assessment because it has the potential to yield difficulty estimates that are competitive with expert judgment, while helping reduce the time and financial burden associated with pilot administrations and scaling to digital testing contexts.
arXiv:2606. 10254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved near-perfect performance in \emph{solving} high-school mathematics, their ability to \emph{evaluate} the diverse reasoning processes of real human students remains under-examined.
arXiv:2510. 12171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have shown strong scientific reasoning ability, but their performance on materials science problems remains less studied.
arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.
arXiv:2604. 04944v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used to evaluate large language models (LLMs).
The paper introduces a pipeline that automatically creates ontology‑grounded multiple‑choice question benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on logical reasoning tasks in scientific AI. By using OWL 2 ontologies, correct answers are guaranteed by design and distractors are generated and formally verified as incorrect through an OWL reasoner. Experiments on three ontologies—Pizza, PMDco, and DOID—yielded 112, 2,491, and 15,216 MCQs, respectively, with high natural‑language quality and challenging zero‑shot performance for six LLMs.
arXiv:2606. 01462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of human reasoning have shown that people are typically stronger at evaluating reasoning than producing it from scratch.
arXiv:2609.15145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) is a critical factor for practical LLM-based applications. To investigate the current reasoning c...
arXiv:2607.14109v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central...
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.