cs.CYMar 18, 2026

Explainability and Certification of AI-Generated Educational Assessments

Authors: Antoun Yaacoub, Zainab Assaghir, Anuradha Kar

Organizations: aivancity School for Technology, Business & Society, 151 Bd Maxime Gorki, 94800 Villejuif, France · Faculty of Science, Lebanese University, Hadath Campus, Hadath, Lebanon

Abstract

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in educational assessment has created new opportunities for scalable item creation, personalized feedback, and efficient formative evaluation. However, despite advances in taxonomy alignment and automated question generation, the absence of transparent, explainable, and certifiable mechanisms limits institutional and accreditation-level acceptance. This chapter proposes a comprehensive framework for explainability and certification of AI-generated assessment items, combining self-rationalization, attribution-based analysis, and post-hoc verification to produce interpretable cognitive-alignment evidence grounded in Bloom's and SOLO taxonomies. A structured certification metadata schema is introduced to capture provenance, alignment predictions, reviewer actions, and ethical indicators, enabling audit-ready documentation consistent with emerging governance requirements. A traffic-light certification workflow operationalizes these signals by distinguishing auto-certifiable items from those requiring human review or rejection. A proof-of-concept study on 500 AI-generated computer science questions demonstrates the framework's feasibility, showing improved transparency, reduced instructor workload, and enhanced auditability. The chapter concludes by outlining ethical implications, policy considerations, and directions for future research, positioning explainability and certification as essential components of trustworthy, accreditation-ready AI assessment systems.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Aug 17, 2026

Dynamic Evidence Collection Ecosystem for Assessment Integrity and Authentic Competence

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) can produce high-quality essays, code, and design artefacts, challenging the validity of conventional assessments that rely on single-point submissions and product-only grading. This paper proposes a design framework called "Dynamic Evidence Collection Ecosystem" that shifts assessment toward continuous, authentic, multi-source evidence of student learning over time. The framework collects process evidence through iterative artefacts, design logs, activity rounds, self-reflection, and peer collaboration, supported by an AI-enabled layer for learning analytics, formative feedback, and transparency. The approach is grounded in recent assessment-redesign scholarship in AI-rich contexts and aligned with contemporary views of authenticity in assessment. This paper builds on the hypothesis that academic integrity is strengthened when it is treated as an assessment design rather than as an AI detection problem. The tools have limitations and risks of use that carry academic penalties. This paper presents an implementation scenario to support institutional adoption.
Mar 16, 2026

AI to Learn 2.0: A Deliverable-Oriented Governance Framework and Maturity Rubric for Opaque AI in Learning-Intensive Domains

Generative AI is entering research, education, and professional work faster than current governance frameworks can specify how AI-assisted outputs should be judged in learning-intensive settings. The central problem is proxy failure: a polished artifact can be useful while no longer serving as credible evidence of the human understanding, judgment, or transfer ability that the work is supposed to cultivate or certify. This paper proposes AI to Learn 2.0, a deliverable-oriented governance framework for AI-assisted work. Rather than claiming element-wise novelty, it reorganizes adjacent ideas around the final deliverable package, distinguishes artifact residual from capability residual, and operationalizes the result through a five-part package, a seven-dimension maturity rubric, gate thresholds on critical dimensions, and a companion capability-evidence ladder. AI to Learn 2.0 allows opaque AI during exploration, drafting, hypothesis generation, and workflow design, but requires that the released deliverable be usable, auditable, transferable, and justifiable without the original large language model or cloud API. In learning-intensive contexts, it additionally requires context-appropriate human-attributable evidence of explanation or transfer. Worked scoring across contrastive cases, including coursework substitution, a symbolic-regression governance contrast, teacher-audited national-exam practice forms, and a self-hosted lecture-to-quiz pipeline with deterministic quality control, shows how the framework separates polished substitution workflows from bounded, auditable, and handoff-ready AI-assisted workflows. AI to Learn 2.0 is proposed as a governance instrument for structured third-party review where capability preservation, accountability, and validity boundaries matter.
May 8, 2026

Creating and Evaluating K-12 GenAI Assessment Graders Through Context Engineering

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into educational assessment represents a transformative shift in classroom grading practices. While automated scoring systems and machine learning techniques have existed for decades, generative AI (GenAI) now enables educators to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with unprecedented efficiency and scale. This paper examines the theoretical foundations and evaluates an LLM grader that uses commercially available foundation models with context and prompt engineering to score student work against a rubric. Drawing on an empirical interrater agreement study using Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) data, we observed the Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) and Proportional Reduction in Mean-Squared Error (PRMSE) across mathematics, science, and ELA, using Claude Sonnet 4, Haiku 4.5, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini. The results demonstrate that LLM graders, especially when based on foundational models with more parameters, achieve substantial agreement with human raters in mathematics and science assessments, while the performances vary in ELA, suggesting generic foundation models can be effective at scoring in given contexts. Additional analysis of teacher and student feedback reveals strong acceptance of AI-generated narrative feedback but skepticism toward numerical scores, suggesting that LLMs function most effectively as formative tools rather than summative evaluators. Our findings indicate that thoughtfully designed hybrid models that combine AI efficiency with teacher judgment can reduce workload, enhance feedback quality, and support equitable assessment practices without displacing professional expertise.