Automated Grading

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Overview

Automated grading studies how to assess student work consistently, from short answers and essays to mathematical reasoning, handwritten exams, and programming assignments. Approaches include fine-tuned language models and encoders, rubric-guided LLM judges, and vision-language systems that read handwritten work; many combine scores with explanations or route uncertain cases to human graders. Systems are commonly evaluated against expert marks using agreement and error measures, with benchmarks testing transfer across subjects, questions, and scoring rubrics. A central challenge is handling partial or ambiguous answers reliably while avoiding bias, prompt sensitivity, and overconfidence, so human oversight remains important, especially for high-stakes decisions.

Latest papers

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89 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Apr 29, 2026

Human-in-the-Loop Benchmarking of Heterogeneous LLMs for Automated Competency Assessment in Secondary Level Mathematics

As Competency-Based Education (CBE) is gaining traction around the world, the shift from marks-based assessment to qualitative competency mapping is a manual challenge for educators. This paper tackles the bottleneck issue by suggesting a "Human-in-the-Loop" benchmarking framework to assess the effectiveness of multiple LLMs in automating secondary-level mathematics assessment. Based on the Grade 10 Optional Mathematics curriculum in Nepal, we created a multi-dimensional rubric for four topics and four cross-cutting competencies: Comprehension, Knowledge, Operational Fluency, and Behavior and Correlation. The multi-provider ensemble, consisted of open-weight models -- Eagle (Llama 3.1-8B) and Orion (Llama 3.3-70B) -- and proprietary frontier models Nova (Gemini 2.5 Flash) and Lyra (Gemini 3 Pro), was benchmarked against a ground truth defined by two senior mathematics faculty members (kappa_w = 0.8652). The findings show a marked "Architecture-compatibility gap". Although the Gemini-based Mixture-of-Experts (Sparse MoE) models achieved "Fair Agreement" (kappa_w ~ 0.38), the larger Orion (70B) model exhibited "No Agreement" (kappa_w = -0.0261), suggesting that architectural compliance with instruction constraints outweighs the scale of raw parameters in rubric-constrained tasks. We conclude that while LLMs are not yet suitable for autonomous certification, they provide high-value assistive support for preliminary evidence extraction within a "Human-in-the-Loop" framework.

Jatin Bhusal, Nancy Mahatha, Aayush Acharya +1

Research and Incubation Center (RAIN), Sunway College Kathmandu

LLM EvaluationEducational AssessmentHuman-in-the-Loop EvaluationRubric-Based EvaluationAutomated Grading
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Apr 25, 2026

Knee-xRAI: An Explainable AI Framework for Automatic Kellgren-Lawrence Grading of Knee Osteoarthritis

Grading knee osteoarthritis (KOA) on plain radiographs is poorly reproducible across readers. A single-grade disagreement on the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale can alter surgical management or redirect a patient from conservative therapy to intra-articular injection. Meanwhile, deep learning models that outperform human readers often offer no explanation for their decisions. We present Knee-xRAI, a pipeline that decomposes the grading process by mimicking clinical radiological workflows. It independently measures joint space narrowing (JSN), osteophytes, and subchondral sclerosis, then combines these findings into an explainable KL grade. Specifically, a U-Net++ architecture quantifies JSN via contour segmentation, an SE-ResNet-50 multi-task network grades osteophytes per anatomical site on the OARSI scale, and a hybrid texture-CNN detects binary sclerosis. This pipeline yields a 50-dimensional feature vector evaluated via an XGBoost-SHAP classifier (Path A, audit) and a ConvNeXt hybrid predictor (Path B, deployed). On 8,260 OAI-derived radiographs, the JSN module achieved a Dice score of 0.8909 and an mJSW ICC of 0.8674. Path A reached a QWK of 0.6294 and an AUC of 0.8046, confirming the structured feature vector carries substantial diagnostic signal. Path B achieved a QWK of 0.8436 and an AUC of 0.9017. SHAP analysis identifies JSN as the dominant feature, with osteophytes adding a consistent increment and sclerosis contributing marginally. Removing JSN evidence collapses KL3-KL4 recall while early grades remain intact, aligning with the KL diagnostic criteria. Knee-xRAI grounds every prediction in an auditable chain of measured radiographic findings, providing clinical transparency at the point of care.

Azmul A. Irfan, Nur Ahmad Khatim, Alfan Alfian Irfan +3

Orthopaedic Department, Faculty of Medicine UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, Indonesia · Informatics Engineering, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Indonesia · Information Technology, Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Indonesia +1

Explainable Medical Image AnalysisAutomated Grading
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Apr 24, 2026

REC-CBM: Rubric-Aware Error-Correction Concept Bottleneck Models for Trustworthy Open-Ended Grading

Open-ended grading is central to equitable and personalized education, yet manual grading remains time-consuming and costly, underscoring the need for automated grading systems. Although recent neural and large language model (LLM) based systems have demonstrated superior performance, they are typically black-box models whose scoring processes and rationales are difficult for educators to verify and trust. Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) have emerged as a promising approach by routing predictions through human-interpretable concepts, providing a mechanistic guarantee of transparency. However, standard CBMs are not tailored to open-ended grading: they do not explicitly model fine-grained rubric dimensions, inadequately capture the ordinal semantics of scoring scales, and neglect inherent reliability issues in human concept annotations. To address these limitations, we propose REC-CBM, a rubric-aware error-correction concept bottleneck model for trustworthy open-ended grading. REC-CBM introduces a rubric-aware concept encoder that learns concept-specific representations over responses and an ordinal pairwise calibration objective that preserves ranking structure among rubric dimensions. It further incorporates a latent concept error-correction module that denoises concept predictions before final grade prediction while preserving interpretability. Comprehensive experiments on publicly available datasets show that REC-CBM consistently improves grading performance and produces more faithful concept-level reasoning than both state-of-the-art baselines. Further analyses validate the contribution of each component and demonstrate the applicability in realistic educational settings. Overall, this work provides a practical, interpretable grading solution that enables educators to inspect, intervene in, and trust automated decisions, advancing more transparent and trustworthy education.

Chengshuai Zhao, Fan Zhang, Kumar Satvik Chaudhary +4

School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, USA · Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, USA · Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, TW

Concept Bottleneck ModelsAutomated Essay ScoringRubric-Based EvaluationAutomated Grading
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Apr 21, 2026

Do Agents Dream of Root Shells? Partial-Credit Evaluation of LLM Agents in Capture the Flag Challenges

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed for autonomous cybersecurity tasks, but their capabilities in realistic offensive settings remain poorly understood. We present DeepRed, an open-source benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents on realistic Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges in isolated virtualized environments. DeepRed places an agent in a Kali attacker environment with terminal tools and optional web search, connected over a private network to a target challenge, and records full execution traces for analysis. To move beyond binary solved/unsolved outcomes, we introduce a partial-credit scoring method based on challenge-specific checkpoints derived from public writeups, together with an automated summarise-then-judge labelling pipeline for assigning checkpoint completion from logs. Using DeepRed, we benchmark ten commercially accessible LLMs on ten VM-based CTF challenges spanning different challenge categories. The results indicate that current agents remain limited: the best model achieves only 35% average checkpoint completion, performing strongest on common challenge types and weakest on tasks requiring non-standard discovery and longer-horizon adaptation.

Ali Al-Kaswan, Maksim Plotnikov, Maxim Hájek +3

Delft University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands

LLM Agent EvaluationAI Agent Security BenchmarksLLMs for CybersecurityAutomated Grading
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Apr 18, 2026

From Scoring to Explanations: Evaluating SHAP and LLM Rationales for Rubric-based Teaching Quality Assessment

Automated scoring models are increasingly used to assign rubric-based quality ratings to complex language performances, including classroom transcripts, yet they typically provide little insight into why a particular score is produced. We propose a general framework for sentence-level interpretability of rubric-based scoring that combines model-agnostic Shapley-value attributions with rationales generated by large language models (LLMs). Instantiated on the Quality of Feedback dimension of the CLASS framework using the NCTE corpus, the framework enables systematic comparison of fine-tuned pretrained language models (PLMs) and prompted LLMs on both scoring performance and explanation faithfulness. Across 6k annotated transcript segments, fine-tuned PLMs outperform LLMs in prediction accuracy but exhibit label compression toward mid-scale scores. Deletion-based tests show that SHAP identifies sentences that reliably drive model predictions, producing typically larger and more coherent prediction shifts than LLM-generated rationales. Cross-model analyses further reveal that SHAP attributions transfer robustly across architectures, whereas LLM rationales exert limited and inconsistent influence. Overall, the findings demonstrate that SHAP provides more faithful and transferable explanations for rubric-based scoring, and that the proposed framework offers a principled basis for evaluating both scoring models and their explanations in high-stakes educational settings and other rubric-based language assessment tasks.

Ivo Bueno, Babette Bühler, Philipp Stark +5

1Technical University of Munich · 2Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) · 3Lund University +3

Educational AssessmentShapley Value AttributionRubric-Based EvaluationExplainability EvaluationAutomated Grading
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Apr 14, 2026

Multitasking Embedding for Embryo Blastocyst Grading Prediction (MEmEBG)

Reliable evaluation of blastocyst quality is critical for the success of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Current embryo grading practices primarily rely on visual assessment of morphological features, which introduces subjectivity, inter-embryologist variability, and challenges in standardizing quality assurance. In this study, we propose a multitask embedding-based approach for the automated analysis and prediction of key blastocyst components, including the trophectoderm (TE), inner cell mass (ICM), and blastocyst expansion (EXP). The method leverages biological and physical characteristics extracted from images of day-5 human embryos. A pretrained ResNet-18 architecture, enhanced with an embedding layer, is employed to learn discriminative representations from a limited dataset and to automatically identify TE and ICM regions along with their corresponding grades, structures that are visually similar and inherently difficult to distinguish. Experimental results demonstrate the promise of the multitask embedding approach and potential for robust and consistent blastocyst quality assessment.

Nahid Khoshk Angabini, Mohsen Tajgardan, Mahesh Madhavan +3

⋆Department of Computer Science and Media Technology, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden · ◦Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Qom University of Technology, Iran · †Kepler Universitätsklinikum, Linz, Austria

Automated GradingMicroscopy Image AnalysisMulti-Task Learning
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Apr 14, 2026

Designing Reliable LLM-Assisted Rubric Scoring for Constructed Responses: Evidence from Physics Exams

Student responses in STEM assessments are often handwritten and combine symbolic expressions, calculations, and diagrams, creating substantial variation in format and interpretation. Despite their importance for evaluating students' reasoning, such responses are time-consuming to score and prone to rater inconsistency, particularly when partial credit is required. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have increased attention to AI-assisted scoring, yet evidence remains limited regarding how rubric design and LLM configurations influence reliability across performance levels. This study examined the reliability of AI-assisted scoring of undergraduate physics constructed responses using GPT-4o. Twenty authentic handwritten exam responses were scored across two rounds by four instructors and by the AI model using skill-based rubrics with differing levels of analytic granularity. Prompting format and temperature settings were systematically varied. Overall, human-AI agreement on total scores was comparable to human inter-rater reliability and was highest for high- and low-performing responses, but declined for mid-level responses involving partial or ambiguous reasoning. Criterion-level analyses showed stronger alignment for clearly defined conceptual skills than for extended procedural judgments. A more fine-grained, checklist-based rubric improved consistency relative to holistic scoring. These findings indicate that reliable AI-assisted scoring depends primarily on clear, well-structured rubrics, while prompting format plays a secondary role and temperature has relatively limited impact. More broadly, the study provides transferable design recommendations for implementing reliable LLM-assisted scoring in STEM contexts through skill-based rubrics and controlled LLM settings.

Xiuxiu Tang, G. Alex Ambrose, Ying Cheng

Department of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA · Notre Dame Learning, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

Automated GradingRubric-Based EvaluationEducational TechnologyInter-Rater ReliabilityAutomated Essay Scoring
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Apr 10, 2026

Automated Scoring of Arabic Text Using Large Language Models: A Literature Review

In modern educational systems, Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) plays a central role by enabling scalable and consistent evaluation of learner responses without human intervention. Recently, the increased accessibility of LLMs and Arabic-specific datasets has sparked renewed interest in this area. In this work, we investigate LLM-Based approaches for the automated evaluation of Arabic texts, focusing on both short answer grading (ASAG) and essay scoring (AES). We further introduce a structured taxonomy comprising five dimensions: application domain, feedback generation capability, LLM architecture deployed, alignment with competency referential frameworks, and prompt engineering strategy. By applying this taxonomy, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing studies, examining their methodological approaches, datasets, evaluation metrics, and reported performance. The findings highlight the need for sustained and pedagogically grounded research efforts in Arabic ATS, given its significance for improving educational quality across Arabic-speaking communities.

Khaoula Dahimi, Hadda Cherroun, Amel Belabbaci

Laboratoire d’Informatique et de Mathématiques LIM Amar Telidji University, Laghouat, Algeria

Automated GradingAutomated Essay ScoringArabic NLP
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Apr 8, 2026

Chatbot-Based Assessment of Code Understanding in Automated Programming Assessment Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) challenge conventional automated programming assessment because students can now produce functionally correct code without demonstrating corresponding understanding. This paper makes two contributions. First, it reports a saturation-based scoping review of conversational assessment approaches in programming education. The review identifies three dominant architectural families: rule-based or template-driven systems, LLM-based systems, and hybrid systems. Across the literature, conversational agents appear promising for scalable feedback and deeper probing of code understanding, but important limitations remain around hallucinations, over-reliance, privacy, integrity, and deployment constraints. Second, the paper synthesizes these findings into a Hybrid Socratic Framework for integrating conversational verification into Automated Programming Assessment Systems (APASs). The framework combines deterministic code analysis with a dual-agent conversational layer, knowledge tracking, scaffolded questioning, and guardrails that tie prompts to runtime facts. The paper also discusses practical safeguards against LLM-generated explanations, including proctored deployment modes, randomized trace questions, stepwise reasoning tied to concrete execution states, and local-model deployment options for privacy-sensitive settings. Rather than replacing conventional testing, the framework is intended as a complementary layer for verifying whether students understand the code they submit.

Eduard Frankford, Erik Cikalleshi, Ruth Breu

University of Innsbruck, Department of Computer Science, Innsbruck, Austria

Educational AssessmentAutomated EvaluationProgramming EducationAutomated GradingMulti-Turn Dialogue Evaluation
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Apr 8, 2026

Persona Matters: Effects of Activation Steering on Short Answer Generation and Scoring

Activation-based steering enables inference-time personalization of large language models, but its effects in educational applications are not well understood. We study activation-based persona vectors representing seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring on the ASAP-SAS benchmark, across three language models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures. Persona steering lowers answer quality overall, with much larger effects on open-ended English Language Arts (ELA) prompts than on factual science prompts. Interpretive and argumentative tasks are particularly sensitive, showing up to 11×\times larger degradation. On the scoring side, we observe predictable valence-aligned calibration shifts: evil'' and impolite'' scorers grade more harshly, while good'' and optimistic'' scorers grade more leniently. ELA tasks are 2.5-3×\times more susceptible to scorer personalization than science tasks, and the mixture-of-experts model shows roughly 6×\times larger calibration shifts than the dense models. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine the effects of activation-steered persona traits in educational generation and scoring. Our findings highlight the need for task- and architecture-aware calibration when deploying personalized models in educational settings.

Yongchao Wu, Aron Henriksson

Stockholm University, NOD-huset, Borgarfjordsgatan 12, 16455 Stockholm, Sweden

Open-Ended GenerationLanguage Model SteeringLanguage Model Generation EvaluationAI in EducationAutomated GradingLanguage Model Calibration+3
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Apr 2, 2026

LumiVideo: An Intelligent Agentic System for Video Color Grading

Video color grading is a critical post-production process that transforms flat, log-encoded raw footage into emotionally resonant cinematic visuals. Existing automated methods act as static, black-box executors that directly output edited pixels, lacking both interpretability and the iterative control required by professionals. We introduce LumiVideo, an agentic system that mimics the cognitive workflow of professional colorists through four stages: Perception, Reasoning, Execution, and Reflection. Given only raw log video, LumiVideo autonomously produces a cinematic base grade by analyzing the scene's physical lighting and semantic content. Its Reasoning engine synergizes an LLM's internalized cinematic knowledge with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework via a Tree of Thoughts (ToT) search to navigate the non-linear color parameter space. Rather than generating pixels, the system compiles the deduced parameters into industry-standard ASC-CDL configurations and a globally consistent 3D LUT, analytically guaranteeing temporal consistency. An optional Reflection loop then allows creators to refine the result via natural language feedback. We further introduce LumiGrade, the first log-encoded video benchmark for evaluating automated grading. Experiments show that LumiVideo approaches human expert quality in fully automatic mode while enabling precise iterative control when directed.

Yuchen Guo, Junli Gong, Hongmin Cai +2

Northwestern University, Evanston, USA · Northeastern University, Seattle, USA · South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China +2

Agentic Video EditingAutomated GradingVideo Editing
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Apr 1, 2026

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation--while providing certainty--based triggers for human intervention.

Ricardo Hidalgo-Aragón, Jesús M. González-Barahona, Gregorio Robles

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain

Educational AssessmentProgramming EducationAutomated Grading
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Mar 31, 2026

When Can We Trust LLM Graders? Calibrating Confidence for Automated Assessment

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for automated grading, but their outputs can be unreliable. Rather than improving grading accuracy directly, we address a complementary problem: predicting when an LLM grader is likely to be correct. This enables selective automation where high-confidence predictions are processed automatically while uncertain cases are flagged for human review. We compare three confidence estimation methods (self-reported confidence, self-consistency voting, and token probability) across seven LLMs of varying scale (4B to 120B parameters) on three educational datasets: RiceChem (long-answer chemistry), SciEntsBank, and Beetle (short-answer science). Our experiments reveal that self-reported confidence consistently achieves the best calibration across all conditions (avg ECE 0.166 vs 0.229 for self-consistency). Surprisingly, self-consistency remains 38% worse despite requiring 5×\times the inference cost. Larger models exhibit substantially better calibration though gains vary by dataset and method (e.g., a 28% ECE reduction for self-reported), with GPT-OSS-120B achieving the best calibration (avg ECE 0.100) and strong discrimination (avg AUC 0.668). We also observe that confidence is strongly top-skewed across methods, creating a ``confidence floor'' that practitioners must account for when setting thresholds. These findings suggest that simply asking LLMs to report their confidence provides a practical approach for identifying reliable grading predictions. Code is available here.

Robinson Ferrer, Damla Turgut, Zhongzhou Chen +1

University of Central Florida

Confidence Estimation in Language ModelsLanguage Model CalibrationAutomated GradingSelective PredictionLLM-as-a-Judge
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Mar 30, 2026

Training data generation for context-dependent rubric-based short answer grading

Every four years, the PISA test is administered by the OECD to test the knowledge of teenage students worldwide and allow for comparisons of educational systems. However, having to avoid language differences and annotator bias makes the grading of student answers challenging. For these reasons, it would be interesting to consider methods of automatic student answer grading. To train some of these methods, which require machine learning, or to compute parameters or select hyperparameters for those that do not, a large amount of domain-specific data is needed. In this work, we explore a small number of methods for creating a large-scale training dataset using only a relatively small confidential dataset as a reference, leveraging a set of very simple derived text formats to preserve confidentiality. Using the proposed methods, we successfully created three surrogate datasets that are, at the very least, superficially more similar to the reference dataset than a straightforward result of prompt-based generation. Early experiments suggest one of these approaches might also lead to improved training of automatic answer grading models.

Pavel Šindelář, Dávid Slivka, Christopher Bouma +2

Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University

Synthetic Data GenerationAutomated Grading
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Mar 29, 2026

Do Small Language Models Know When They're Wrong? Confidence-Based Cascade Scoring for Educational Assessment

Automated scoring of student work at scale requires balancing accuracy against cost and latency. In "cascade" systems, small language models (LMs) handle easier scoring tasks while escalating harder ones to larger LMs -- but the challenge is determining which cases to escalate. We explore verbalized confidence -- asking the LM to state a numerical confidence alongside its prediction -- as a routing signal. Using 2,100 expert-scored decisions from student-AI math conversations, we evaluate cascade systems built from GPT-5.4, Claude 4.5+, and Gemini 3.1 model pairs. We find that: (1) confidence discrimination varies widely across small LMs, with the best achieving AUROC 0.857 and the worst producing a near-degenerate confidence distribution; (2) confidence tracks human scoring difficulty, with lower LM confidence where annotators disagreed and took longer to score; (3) the best cascade approached large-LM accuracy (kappa 0.802 vs. 0.819) at 76% lower cost and 61% lower latency. Confidence discrimination is the bottleneck: the two small LMs with meaningful confidence variance yielded cascades with no statistically detectable kappa loss, while the third -- whose confidence was near-degenerate -- could not close the accuracy gap regardless of threshold. Small LMs with strong discrimination let practitioners trade cost for accuracy along the frontier; those without it do not.

Tyler Burleigh

Khan Academy

Language Model CascadingAutomated GradingLanguage Model Self-AssessmentEducational AssessmentConfidence Estimation in Language ModelsEfficient Language Model Inference
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Mar 26, 2026

Self-Supervised Learning for Knee Osteoarthritis: Diagnostic Limitations and Prognostic Value of Hospital Data

This study assesses whether self-supervised learning (SSL) improves knee osteoarthritis (OA) modeling for diagnosis and prognosis relative to ImageNet-pretrained initialization. We compared (i) image-only SSL pretrained on knee radiographs from the OAI, MOST, and NYU cohorts, and (ii) multimodal image-text SSL pretrained on hospital knee radiographs paired with radiologist impressions. For diagnostic Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) grade prediction, SSL yielded mixed results. While image-only SSL improved accuracy during linear probing (frozen encoder), it did not outperform ImageNet pretraining during full fine-tuning. Similarly, multimodal SSL failed to improve grading performance. A likely explanation is mismatch between the hospital pretraining corpus and the downstream diagnostic task: the hospital image-text dataset was restricted to knees from patients with clinically identified OA in routine care, rather than a cohort spanning the full spectrum from normal to severe disease needed for balanced KL grading. In addition, radiology impressions do not explicitly encode KL grade, limiting supervision for learning KL-specific decision boundaries. In contrast, this same multimodal initialization significantly improved prognostic modeling. It outperformed ImageNet baselines in predicting 4-year structural incidence and progression, including on external validation (MOST AUROC: 0.701 vs. 0.599 at 10% labeled data). Overall, these results suggest that our hospital image-text data may be less effective for diagnostic grading when the pretraining cohort is limited to OA knees, but can provide a strong signal for prognostic modeling when the downstream task is better aligned with the pretraining data distribution.

Haresh Rengaraj Rajamohan, Yuxuan Chen, Kyunghyun Cho +1

Center for Data Science, New York University, New York, 10011, NY, United States · Perlmutter Cancer Center, New York University Langone Health, New York, 10016, NY, USA · Department of Radiology, New York University Langone Health, New York, 10016, NY, USA +1

Self-Supervised LearningRadiology VLMsMultimodal PretrainingAutomated GradingClinical Outcome Prediction
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Mar 21, 2026

Exploring Data Augmentation and Resampling Strategies for Transformer-Based Models to Address Class Imbalance in AI Scoring of Scientific Explanations in NGSS Classroom

Automated scoring of students' scientific explanations offers the potential for immediate, accurate feedback, yet class imbalance in rubric categories particularly those capturing advanced reasoning remains a challenge. This study investigates augmentation strategies to improve transformer-based text classification of student responses to a physical science assessment based on an NGSS-aligned learning progression. The dataset consists of 1,466 high school responses scored on 11 binary-coded analytic categories. This rubric identifies six important components including scientific ideas needed for a complete explanation along with five common incomplete or inaccurate ideas. Using SciBERT as a baseline, we applied fine-tuning and test these augmentation strategies: (1) GPT-4--generated synthetic responses, (2) EASE, a word-level extraction and filtering approach, and (3) ALP (Augmentation using Lexicalized Probabilistic context-free grammar) phrase-level extraction. While fine-tuning SciBERT improved recall over baseline, augmentation substantially enhanced performance, with GPT data boosting both precision and recall, and ALP achieving perfect precision, recall, and F1 scores across most severe imbalanced categories (5,6,7 and 9). Across all rubric categories EASE augmentation substantially increased alignment with human scoring for both scientific ideas (Categories 1--6) and inaccurate ideas (Categories 7--11). We compared different augmentation strategies to a traditional oversampling method (SMOTE) in an effort to avoid overfitting and retain novice-level data critical for learning progression alignment. Findings demonstrate that targeted augmentation can address severe imbalance while preserving conceptual coverage, offering a scalable solution for automated learning progression-aligned scoring in science education.

Prudence Djagba, Kevin Haudek, Clare G. C. Franovic +1

CREATE for STEM, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA · Human Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA · University of Houston, Houston, USA

Science EducationAutomated GradingClass-Imbalanced LearningSynthetic Data AugmentationEducational Technology
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Mar 19, 2026

Implicit Grading Bias in Large Language Models: How Writing Style Affects Automated Assessment Across Math, Programming, and Essay Tasks

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as automated graders in educational settings, concerns about fairness and bias in their evaluations have become critical. This study investigates whether LLMs exhibit implicit grading bias based on writing style when the underlying content correctness remains constant. We constructed a controlled dataset of 180 student responses across three subjects (Mathematics, Programming, and Essay/Writing), each with three surface-level perturbation types: grammar errors, informal language, and non-native phrasing. Two state-of-the-art open-source LLMs -- LLaMA 3.3 70B (Meta) and Qwen 2.5 72B (Alibaba) -- were prompted to grade responses on a 1-10 scale with explicit instructions to evaluate content correctness only and to disregard writing style. Our results reveal statistically significant grading bias in Essay/Writing tasks across both models and all perturbation types (p < 0.05), with effect sizes ranging from medium (Cohen's d = 0.64) to very large (d = 4.25). Informal language received the heaviest penalty, with LLaMA deducting an average of 1.90 points and Qwen deducting 1.20 points on a 10-point scale -- penalties comparable to the difference between a B+ and C+ letter grade. Non-native phrasing was penalized 1.35 and 0.90 points respectively. In sharp contrast, Mathematics and Programming tasks showed minimal bias, with most conditions failing to reach statistical significance. These findings demonstrate that LLM grading bias is subject-dependent, style-sensitive, and persists despite explicit counter-bias instructions in the grading prompt. We discuss implications for equitable deployment of LLM-based grading systems and recommend bias auditing protocols before institutional adoption.

Rudra Jadhav, Janhavi Danve, Sonalika Shaw

Department of Computer Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India · Department of Computer Science, Dr. D. Y. Patil School of Science and Technology, Pune, India

Language Model Bias EvaluationLinguistic Bias in Language ModelsBias in LLM-as-a-JudgeAutomated GradingAutomated Essay Scoring
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Mar 16, 2026

LLM-as-a-judge validity is strongly task-dependent across physics assessment formats

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered for automated assessment and feedback, understanding when LLM marking is valid is essential. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge marking across four settings spanning three assessment formats - structured questions, written essays, and scientific plots - comparing GPT-5.2, Grok 4.1, Claude Opus 4.5, DeepSeek-V3.2, Gemini 3 Pro, and committee aggregations against human markers under blind, solution-provided, false-solution, and anchored conditions. We distinguish absolute accuracy from rank-order agreement, since a marking system can match the distribution of human marks while failing to order responses by quality. Across task types, performance is sharply task-dependent. For blind university exam questions (n=771n=771) and secondary and university structured questions (n=1151n=1151), models show robust rank-order agreement with human markers (Spearman ρ>0.6ρ> 0.6), with official solutions reducing error and strengthening agreement. False solutions degrade absolute accuracy, showing that models defer to provided references, but leave rank-ordering intact. Essay marking behaves fundamentally differently. Across n=55n=55 scripts, each containing five essays (n=275n=275 essays total), blind AI marking is harsher and more variable than human marking and adding marking guidance does not improve rank-order agreement. Anchored exemplars shift the AI mean close to the human mean and compress variance below the human standard deviation, but rank-order agreement remains near-zero. For code-based plot elements (n=1400n=1400), models achieve high rank-order agreement (ρ>0.83ρ> 0.83) with near-linear calibration. LLM marking validity depended strongly on the assessment task, and this held for every contemporary model tested. The results also show that the reliability of the human benchmark constrains the claims that can be made about AI-human agreement.

Will Yeadon, Tom Hardy, Paul Mackay +1

Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, UK

LLM-as-a-JudgeEducational AssessmentAutomated Essay ScoringAutomated Grading
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Mar 13, 2026

Human-in-the-Loop LLM Grading for Handwritten Mathematics Assessments

Providing timely and individualised feedback on handwritten student work is highly beneficial for learning but difficult to achieve at scale. This challenge has become more pressing as generative AI undermines the reliability of take-home assessments, shifting emphasis toward supervised, in-class evaluation. We present a scalable, end-to-end workflow for LLM-assisted grading of short, pen-and-paper assessments. The workflow spans (1) constructing solution keys, (2) developing detailed rubric-style grading keys used to guide the LLM, and (3) a grading procedure that combines automated scanning and anonymisation, multi-pass LLM scoring, automated consistency checks, and mandatory human verification. We deploy the system in two undergraduate mathematics courses using six low-stakes in-class tests. Empirically, LLM assistance reduces grading time by approximately 23% while achieving agreement comparable to, and in several cases tighter than, fully manual grading. Occasional model errors occur but are effectively contained by the hybrid design. Overall, our results show that carefully embedded human-in-the-loop LLM grading can substantially reduce workload while maintaining fairness and accuracy.

Arne Vanhoyweghen, Vincent Holst, Melika Mobini +9

Data Analytics Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussel, Belgium · School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

Automated GradingAI in EducationHuman-in-the-Loop Evaluation
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Mar 12, 2026

CHiL(L)Grader: Calibrated Human-in-the-Loop Short-Answer Grading

Scaling educational assessment with large language models requires not just accuracy, but the ability to recognize when predictions are trustworthy. Instruction-tuned models tend to be overconfident, and their reliability deteriorates as curricula evolve, making fully autonomous deployment unsafe in high-stakes settings. We introduce CHiL(L)Grader, the first automated grading framework that incorporates calibrated confidence estimation into a human-in-the-loop workflow. Using post-hoc temperature scaling, confidence-based selective prediction, and continual learning, CHiL(L)Grader automates only high-confidence predictions while routing uncertain cases to human graders, and adapts to evolving rubrics and unseen questions. Across three short-answer grading datasets, CHiL(L)Grader automatically scores 35-65% of responses at expert-level quality (QWK >= 0.80). A QWK gap of 0.347 between accepted and rejected predictions confirms the effectiveness of the confidence-based routing. Each correction cycle strengthens the model's grading capability as it learns from teacher feedback. These results show that uncertainty quantification is key for reliable AI-assisted grading.

Pranav Raikote, Korbinian Randl, Ioanna Miliou +2

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, 164 25 Kista, Sweden

Automated GradingAI in EducationHuman-in-the-Loop EvaluationLanguage Model Calibration
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Mar 10, 2026

S-GRADES -- Studying Generalization of Student Response Assessments in Diverse Evaluative Settings

Evaluating student responses, from long essays to short factual answers, is a key challenge in educational NLP. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) focuses on holistic writing qualities such as coherence and argumentation, while Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) emphasizes factual correctness and conceptual understanding. Despite their shared goal, these paradigms have progressed in isolation with fragmented datasets, inconsistent metrics, and separate communities. We introduce S-GRADES (Studying Generalization of Student Response Assessments in Diverse Evaluative Settings), a web-based benchmark that consolidates 14 diverse grading datasets under a unified interface with standardized access and reproducible evaluation protocols. The benchmark is fully open-source and designed for extensibility, enabling continuous integration of new datasets and evaluation settings. To demonstrate the utility of S-GRADES, we evaluate three state-of-the-art large language models across the benchmark using multiple reasoning strategies in prompting. We further examine the effects of exemplar selection and cross-dataset exemplar transfer. Our analyses illustrate how benchmark-driven evaluation reveals reliability and generalization gaps across essay and short-answer grading tasks, highlighting the importance of standardized, cross-paradigm assessment.

Tasfia Seuti, Sagnik Ray Choudhury

University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

Automated GradingEducational AssessmentAutomated Essay Scoring
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Mar 5, 2026

Autoscoring Anticlimax: A Meta-analytic Understanding of AI's Short-answer Shortcomings and Wording Weaknesses

Automated short-answer scoring lags other LLM applications. We meta-analyze 890 culminating results across a systematic review of LLM short-answer scoring studies, modeling the traditional effect size of Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) with mixed effects metaregression. We quantitatively illustrate that that the level of difficulty for human experts to perform the task of scoring written work of children has no observed statistical effect on LLM performance. Particularly, we show that some scoring tasks measured as the easiest by human scorers were the hardest for LLMs. Whether by poor implementation by thoughtful researchers or patterns traceable to autoregressive training, on average decoder-only architectures underperform encoders by 0.37--a substantial difference in agreement with humans. Additionally, we measure the contributions of various aspects of LLM technology on successful scoring such as tokenizer vocabulary size, which exhibits diminishing returns--potentially due to undertrained tokens. Findings argue for systems design which better anticipates known statistical shortcomings of autoregressive models. Finally, we provide additional experiments to illustrate wording and tokenization sensitivity and bias elicitation in high-stakes education contexts, where LLMs demonstrate racial discrimination. Code and data for this study are available.

Michael Hardy

Stanford University

Automated GradingAutomated Essay Scoring
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Mar 1, 2026

Evaluating AI Grading on Real-World Handwritten College Mathematics: A Large-Scale Study Toward a Benchmark

Grading in large undergraduate STEM courses often yields minimal feedback due to heavy instructional workloads. We present a large-scale empirical study of AI grading on real, handwritten single-variable calculus work from UC Irvine. Using OCR-conditioned large language models with structured, rubric-guided prompting, our system produces scores and formative feedback for thousands of free-response quiz submissions from nearly 800 students. In a setting with no single ground-truth label, we evaluate performance against official teaching-assistant grades, student surveys, and independent human review, finding strong alignment with TA scoring and a large majority of AI-generated feedback rated as correct or acceptable across quizzes. Beyond calculus, this setting highlights core challenges in OCR-conditioned mathematical reasoning and partial-credit assessment. We analyze key failure modes, propose practical rubric- and prompt-design principles, and introduce a multi-perspective evaluation protocol for reliable, real-course deployment. Building on the dataset and evaluation framework developed here, we outline a standardized benchmark for AI grading of handwritten mathematics to support reproducible comparison and future research.

Zhiqi Yu, Xingping Liu, Haobin Mao +4

UC Irvine Irvine, USA · Independent Shanghai, China · UC Berkeley Berkeley, USA

Automated GradingGenerative AI in EducationLLM Mathematical ReasoningRubric-Based Evaluation
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Feb 28, 2026

Optimizing In-Context Demonstrations for LLM-based Automated Grading

Automated assessment of open-ended student responses is a critical capability for scaling personalized feedback in education. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in grading tasks via in-context learning (ICL), their reliability is heavily dependent on the selection of few-shot exemplars and the construction of high-quality rationales. Standard retrieval methods typically select examples based on semantic similarity, which often fails to capture subtle decision boundaries required for rubric adherence. Furthermore, manually crafting the expert rationales needed to guide these models can be a significant bottleneck. To address these limitations, we introduce GUIDE (Grading Using Iteratively Designed Exemplars), a framework that reframes exemplar selection and refinement in automated grading as a boundary-focused optimization problem. GUIDE operates on a continuous loop of selection and refinement, employing novel contrastive operators to identify "boundary pairs" that are semantically similar but possess different grades. We enhance exemplars by generating discriminative rationales that explicitly articulate why a response receives a specific score to the exclusion of adjacent grades. Extensive experiments across datasets in physics, chemistry, and pedagogical content knowledge demonstrate that GUIDE significantly outperforms standard retrieval baselines. By focusing the model's attention on the precise edges of rubric, our approach shows exceptionally robust gains on borderline cases and improved rubric adherence. GUIDE paves the way for trusted, scalable assessment systems that align closely with human pedagogical standards.

Yucheng Chu, Hang Li, Kaiqi Yang +4

Michigan State University · University of Southern California

EducationAutomated GradingIn-Context Example SelectionAI in EducationRubric-Based Evaluation
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Feb 28, 2026

From Flat to Structural: Enhancing Automated Short Answer Grading with GraphRAG

Automated short answer grading (ASAG) is critical for scaling educational assessment, yet large language models (LLMs) often struggle with hallucinations and strict rubric adherence due to their reliance on generalized pre-training. While Rretrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, standard "flat" vector retrieval mechanisms treat knowledge as isolated fragments, failing to capture the structural relationships and multi-hop reasoning essential for complex educational content. To address this limitation, we introduce a Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) framework that organizes reference materials into a structured knowledge graph to explicitly model dependencies between concepts. Our methodology employs a dual-phase pipeline: utilizing Microsoft GraphRAG for high-fidelity graph construction and the HippoRAG neurosymbolic algorithm to execute associative graph traversals, thereby retrieving comprehensive, connected subgraphs of evidence. Experimental evaluations on a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) dataset demonstrate that this structural approach significantly outperforms standard RAG baselines across all metrics. Notably, the HippoRAG implementation achieved substantial improvements in evaluating Science and Engineering Practices (SEP), confirming the superiority of structural retrieval in verifying the logical reasoning chains required for higher-order academic assessment.

Yucheng Chu, Haoyu Han, Shen Dong +6

Michigan State University · University of Southern California

Automated GradingEducational AssessmentGraph Retrieval-Augmented GenerationKnowledge Graphs
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Feb 28, 2026

Confusion-Aware Rubric Optimization for LLM-based Automated Grading

Accurate and unambiguous guidelines are critical for large language model (LLM) based graders, yet manually crafting these prompts is often sub-optimal as LLMs can misinterpret expert guidelines or lack necessary domain specificity. Consequently, the field has moved toward automated prompt optimization to refine grading guidelines without the burden of manual trial and error. However, existing frameworks typically aggregate independent and unstructured error samples into a single update step, resulting in "rule dilution" where conflicting constraints weaken the model's grading logic. To address these limitations, we introduce Confusion-Aware Rubric Optimization (CARO), a novel framework that enhances accuracy and computational efficiency by structurally separating error signals. CARO leverages the confusion matrix to decompose monolithic error signals into distinct modes, allowing for the diagnosis and repair of specific misclassification patterns individually. By synthesizing targeted "fixing patches" for dominant error modes and employing a diversity-aware selection mechanism, the framework prevents guidance conflict and eliminates the need for resource-heavy nested refinement loops. Empirical evaluations on teacher education and STEM datasets demonstrate that CARO significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods. These results suggest that replacing mixed-error aggregation with surgical, mode-specific repair yields robust improvements in automated assessment scalability and precision.

Yucheng Chu, Hang Li, Kaiqi Yang +4

Michigan State University · University of Southern California

Automated GradingPrompt OptimizationRubric-Based EvaluationLLM-as-a-Judge
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Feb 24, 2026

QEDBENCH: Quantifying the Alignment Gap in Automated Evaluation of University-Level Mathematical Proofs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) saturate elementary benchmarks, the research frontier has shifted from generation to the reliability of automated evaluation. We demonstrate that standard "LLM-as-a-Judge" protocols suffer from a systematic Alignment Gap when applied to upper-undergraduate to early graduate level mathematics. To quantify this, we introduce QEDBench, the first large-scale dual-rubric alignment benchmark to systematically measure alignment with human experts on university-level math proofs by contrasting course-specific rubrics against expert common knowledge criteria. By deploying a dual-evaluation matrix (7 judges x 5 solvers) against 1,000+ hours of human evaluation, we reveal that certain frontier evaluators like Claude Opus 4.5, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen 2.5 Max, and Llama 4 Maverick exhibit significant positive bias (up to +0.18, +0.20, +0.30, +0.36 mean score inflation, respectively). Furthermore, we uncover a critical reasoning gap in the discrete domain: while Gemini 3.0 Pro achieves state-of-the-art performance (0.91 average human evaluation score), other reasoning models like GPT-5 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 see their performance significantly degrade in discrete domains. Specifically, their average human evaluation scores drop to 0.72 and 0.63 in Discrete Math, and to 0.74 and 0.50 in Graph Theory. In addition to these research results, we also release QEDBench as a public benchmark for evaluating and improving AI judges. Our benchmark is publicly published at https://github.com/qqliu/Yale-QEDBench.

Santiago Gonzalez, Alireza Amiri Bavandpour, Peter Ye +48

Mathematical Reasoning BenchmarksLLM EvaluationLLM-as-a-JudgeLanguage Model Bias EvaluationAutomated Grading
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Feb 17, 2026

How Uncertain Is the Grade? A Benchmark of Uncertainty Metrics for LLM-Based Automatic Assessment

The rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping the landscape of automatic assessment in education. While these systems demonstrate substantial advantages in adaptability to diverse question types and flexibility in output formats, they also introduce new challenges related to output uncertainty, stemming from the inherently probabilistic nature of LLMs. Output uncertainty is an inescapable challenge in automatic assessment, as assessment results often play a critical role in informing subsequent pedagogical actions, such as providing feedback to students or guiding instructional decisions. Unreliable or poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates can lead to unstable downstream interventions, potentially disrupting students' learning processes and resulting in unintended negative consequences. To systematically understand this challenge and inform future research, we benchmark a broad range of uncertainty quantification methods in the context of LLM-based automatic assessment. Although the effectiveness of these methods has been demonstrated in many tasks across other domains, their applicability and reliability in educational settings, particularly for automatic grading, remain underexplored. Through comprehensive analyses of uncertainty behaviors across multiple assessment datasets, LLM families, and generation control settings, we characterize the uncertainty patterns exhibited by LLMs in grading scenarios. Based on these findings, we evaluate the strengths and limitations of different uncertainty metrics and analyze the influence of key factors, including model families, assessment tasks, and decoding strategies, on uncertainty estimates. Our study provides actionable insights into the characteristics of uncertainty in LLM-based automatic assessment and lays the groundwork for developing more reliable and effective uncertainty-aware grading systems in the future.

Hang Li, Kaiqi Yang, Xianxuan Long +9

Washington State University, Pullman, USA

Uncertainty QuantificationLLM Uncertainty EstimationUncertainty CalibrationEducational AssessmentAutomated Grading
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