The paper proposes a response‑free method for estimating difficulty of reading‑comprehension multiple‑choice items by fine‑tuning a transformer on item wording. It introduces two extensions to a baseline joint‑encoding model: a component‑wise variant that encodes passage, question, and options separately, and a multi‑task variant that adds a question‑answering auxiliary task. Experiments on a corpus of nearly 30,000 items show that both extensions outperform the baseline, especially the multi‑task variant across all metrics and the component‑wise variant in rank ordering, even with limited training data.
arXiv:2511. 21692v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation.
arXiv:2606. 28186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting human item difficulty is central to educational assessment, where reliable estimates support fairness and effective test construction.
arXiv:2607. 28634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The estimation of item difficulty plays a key role in both formative assessment and large-scale high-stakes summative assessments.
The paper proposes a model-based evaluation framework that merges multidimensional item response theory (IRT) with question context embeddings to predict large language model (LLM) performance on unseen questions. By representing LLMs with latent capability profiles and incorporating question content to inform item characteristics, the approach improves prediction accuracy over model-free baselines in within-scenario settings and offers a richer description of capability variation than unidimensional models. However, the study also finds that this generalizability does not reliably extend to cross-scenario shifts, indicating a key limitation for broader application.
arXiv:2601. 02580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional methods for determining assessment item parameters, such as difficulty and discrimination, rely heavily on expensive field testing to collect student performance data for Item Response Theory (IRT) calibration.
arXiv:2609.07309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robustness evaluation of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in assessing their sensitivity to perturbations in i...
arXiv:2610.09660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic Short Answer Scoring (ASAS) requires models that can score student responses against question-specific criteria while remaining efficient and...
The paper introduces a data-driven method to generate natural-language explanations for why some questions are harder than others. It estimates question difficulty using Item Response Theory on large language model responses, then prompts an LLM to propose hypotheses that are validated on held-out data. Experiments on mathematical, logical, and commonsense datasets show that these hypotheses are interpretable, predictive, and can be used to adjust question difficulty causally.
arXiv:2610.19532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing student models in educational applications largely focus on student responses to questions. However, as tutoring becomes more accessible at...
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:2510. 05969v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient resource allocation.
arXiv:2606. 06906v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context question answering (QA) remains challenging for smaller language models even when answer-bearing evidence is already present in the input.