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.
By Jhen-Ke Lin
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.
By Hartwig Grabowski
arXiv:2607. 01247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-ended mathematics exams are valuable because they assess reasoning, proof construction, algorithmic thinking, and communication of intermediate steps.
By Aastha Sapkota, M. G. Sarwar Murshed
arXiv:2608. 07523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Difficulty differences across parallel-class programming examinations affect the fairness of course assessment.
By Hongfei Yan, Jiangkai Xiong, Yiqing Li, Chong Chen
arXiv:2606. 15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns.
By Costa Georgantas
The paper introduces a penalty‑aware evaluation framework for Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that uses asymmetric scoring, knowledge‑gap canaries, and a failure‑attribution pipeline. Applying this framework to three commercial RAG products and a baseline on SimpleQA‑Verified, the authors find that while overall accuracy is similar across systems, canary violation rates vary dramatically, showing that systems differ more in when they answer than in what they answer. The study demonstrates that penalty‑aware scoring can reorder system rankings and is robust across different penalty settings.
By Alden Do Rosario, Hussein Younes, Felipe Pires