arXiv AI

Reconstructing Item Characteristic Curves using Fine-Tuned Large Language Models

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

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 AI
Sep 3

Response-free item difficulty modelling for multiple-choice items with fine-tuned transformers: Component-wise representation and multi-task learning

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.

By Jan Net\'ik, Patr\'icia Martinkov\'a
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Check The Scoreboard: An Analysis of Scoring Schemes on Multiple-Choice Evaluation

The paper investigates how different scoring schemes affect the evaluation of multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) models. It introduces six education-inspired scoring methods that assess abilities such as distractor elimination, abstention, confidence calibration, and self-correction. Experiments on large language models show that these alternative schemes can change model rankings, better predict user preferences, and reveal distinct capabilities compared to traditional accuracy scoring.

By Nishant Balepur, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Eunsol Choi, Rachel Rudinger, Jordan Boyd-Graber