arXiv:2606. 11477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Correcting handwritten exams by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, particularly for large cohorts, while fully digital exams tend to force a didactic narrowing towards closed question formats.
arXiv:2606. 24973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a dataset of 32,534 double-marked real student responses to GCSE mock exams (GCSEs are the UK's national exams, taken at age ~16), spanning 328 questions across five subjects and including handwritten work.
arXiv:2607. 18767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in educational settings offers significant advantages in terms of privacy, cost, and scalability.
arXiv:2606. 08855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines the limitations of fully digital and partially digital e-assessment approaches in summative examinations in higher education.
arXiv:2609.14284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Criterion-level grading connects examination performance to learning outcomes, but manual marking introduces workload and variation between markers. Th...
The paper introduces THPT‑Ladder, a benchmark based on Vietnam’s 2025 National High School Graduation Examination’s convex grading scheme, which rewards partial credit non‑additively. It shows that standard accuracy metrics inflate model scores because they treat partial knowledge proportionally, whereas the official rubric penalizes incomplete correct sets. Using the benchmark, the authors demonstrate that this discrepancy can shift a model’s percentile ranking by up to 13 points among over 480,000 candidates.
The study evaluates large language model (LLM) graders on two computer‑science exams, testing 171 configurations of closed‑ and open‑weights models. While the best LLM configuration achieved a mean absolute error of 1.64/35—better than the 2.61/35 error between two human graders—its performance was highly sensitive to the prompt. A short "strict grader" preamble caused most open‑weight models to exceed acceptable error thresholds or stop grading entirely, whereas fine‑tuning with a single LoRA adapter restored parity with human graders and reduced sensitivity to harsh prompts.
Small language models can grade open‑ended exam answers as reliably as much larger models when they use an explicit rubric. In experiments with six cost‑efficient model configurations, the rubric decouples grading from judge intelligence, with answer identity explaining 95.6% of score variance and judge identity only 0.2%. Removing rubric criteria or the official answer collapses reliability and inflates scores, showing the rubric’s essential role.
arXiv:2606. 24839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic data analysis systems produce rich outputs, including code, numerical results, and verbal diagnostics.
arXiv:2609.00232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-centric document understanding and text-rich visual reasoning benchmar...
arXiv:2605.14040v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trackable improvement in multimodal physics reasoning rests on a training-and-evaluation system that is itself rarely verified: the corpora a model...
arXiv:2606. 31543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent, internally coherent reasoning traces for abstract reasoning tasks while still being confidently wrong - making selection among candidates, not just generation, the central challenge.
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...