SteLLA: A Structured Grading System Using LLMs with RAG

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Qiu, Hefei, White, Brian, Ding, Ashley, Costa, Reinaldo, Hachem, Ali, Ding, Wei, Chen, Ping
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Qiu, Hefei
White, Brian
Ding, Ashley
Costa, Reinaldo
Hachem, Ali
Ding, Wei
Chen, Ping
author_facet Qiu, Hefei
White, Brian
Ding, Ashley
Costa, Reinaldo
Hachem, Ali
Ding, Wei
Chen, Ping
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong general capabilities in many applications. However, how to make them reliable tools for some specific tasks such as automated short answer grading (ASAG) remains a challenge. We present SteLLA (Structured Grading System Using LLMs with RAG) in which a) Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach is used to empower LLMs specifically on the ASAG task by extracting structured information from the highly relevant and reliable external knowledge based on the instructor-provided reference answer and rubric, b) an LLM performs a structured and question-answering-based evaluation of student answers to provide analytical grades and feedback. A real-world dataset that contains students' answers in an exam was collected from a college-level Biology course. Experiments show that our proposed system can achieve substantial agreement with the human grader while providing break-down grades and feedback on all the knowledge points examined in the problem. A qualitative and error analysis of the feedback generated by GPT4 shows that GPT4 is good at capturing facts while may be prone to inferring too much implication from the given text in the grading task which provides insights into the usage of LLMs in the ASAG system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09092
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SteLLA: A Structured Grading System Using LLMs with RAG
Qiu, Hefei
White, Brian
Ding, Ashley
Costa, Reinaldo
Hachem, Ali
Ding, Wei
Chen, Ping
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong general capabilities in many applications. However, how to make them reliable tools for some specific tasks such as automated short answer grading (ASAG) remains a challenge. We present SteLLA (Structured Grading System Using LLMs with RAG) in which a) Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach is used to empower LLMs specifically on the ASAG task by extracting structured information from the highly relevant and reliable external knowledge based on the instructor-provided reference answer and rubric, b) an LLM performs a structured and question-answering-based evaluation of student answers to provide analytical grades and feedback. A real-world dataset that contains students' answers in an exam was collected from a college-level Biology course. Experiments show that our proposed system can achieve substantial agreement with the human grader while providing break-down grades and feedback on all the knowledge points examined in the problem. A qualitative and error analysis of the feedback generated by GPT4 shows that GPT4 is good at capturing facts while may be prone to inferring too much implication from the given text in the grading task which provides insights into the usage of LLMs in the ASAG system.
title SteLLA: A Structured Grading System Using LLMs with RAG
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09092