Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination.
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:2511. 04689v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) typically requires thousands of benchmark items, making the process expensive, slow, and increasingly impractical at scale.
arXiv:2607. 25257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Item Response Theory (IRT) has recently been proposed as a framework for evaluating large language model (LLM) benchmarks by separating a model's latent ability from the properties of individual benchmark items.
arXiv:2511. 21140v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as scalable evaluators of model responses in lieu of human annotators.
arXiv:2609.16993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are now common in student assessment, but we know little about how student demographics affect their use. Sometimes, considerin...
arXiv:2607. 26317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Psychometric calibration for educational tests typically requires costly human response 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:2609.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate the responses of other language models. This approach, known as LLM-as-a-Judge, is faste...
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 investigates item-sensitivity—whether a language model’s choice depends on the specific input—in a forced-choice signalling task derived from the board game Deception: Murder in Hong Kong. Across seven models, two families, a post‑training ablation, and three scoring rules, every tested cell shows item‑sensitivity, yet many are statistically indistinguishable from random choice and some perform worse than random. The authors term this phenomenon "consistency without alignment" and argue it undermines evaluations that rely solely on item‑sensitivity, permutation consistency, or self‑consistency without an independent reference.
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:2606. 06546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for education requires measuring how models teach, not only what they know.