arXiv Computation and Language By Brianne Lee

Which Answer Did the Seventeen-Year-Old Write? A Behavioral Case Study of Author-Age Misattribution, Miscalibrated Confidence, and Non-Corrective Self-Explanation in Six Frontier Language Models

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The paper reports a structured case study in which six frontier language models were asked to match handwritten exam answers to the ages of the writers. Three of the models performed at chance on the matching task while still reporting high confidence, and the youngest writer’s answer was misattributed to an adult in up to 90% of trials. Removing the multiple‑choice scaffold and changing institutional framing further degraded accuracy, while a single audience‑awareness instruction improved performance for one model but had no effect on the weakest models.

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