Automated Feedback Generation for Undergraduate Mathematics: Development and Evaluation of an AI Teaching Assistant

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Gohr, Aron, Lawn, Marie-Amelie, Gao, Kevin, Serjeant, Inigo, Heslip, Stephen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866909983235375104
author Gohr, Aron
Lawn, Marie-Amelie
Gao, Kevin
Serjeant, Inigo
Heslip, Stephen
author_facet Gohr, Aron
Lawn, Marie-Amelie
Gao, Kevin
Serjeant, Inigo
Heslip, Stephen
contents Intelligent tutoring systems have long enabled automated immediate feedback on student work when it is presented in a tightly structured format and when problems are very constrained, but reliably assessing free-form mathematical reasoning remains challenging. We present a system that processes free-form natural language input, handles a wide range of edge cases, and comments competently not only on the technical correctness of submitted proofs, but also on style and presentation issues. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to the evaluation of such a system, and show that by the metrics we evaluate, the quality of the feedback generated is comparable to that produced by human experts when assessing early undergraduate homework. We stress-test our system with a small set of more advanced and unusual questions, and report both significant gaps and encouraging successes in that more challenging setting. Our system uses large language models in a modular workflow. The workflow configuration is human-readable and editable without programming knowledge, and allows some intermediate steps to be precomputed or injected by the instructor. A version of our tool is deployed on the Imperial mathematics homework platform Lambdafeedback. We report also on the integration of our tool into this platform.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_03458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Feedback Generation for Undergraduate Mathematics: Development and Evaluation of an AI Teaching Assistant
Gohr, Aron
Lawn, Marie-Amelie
Gao, Kevin
Serjeant, Inigo
Heslip, Stephen
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
97U70, 97C70, 68T50, 68T07
F.4.1; I.2.7; I.2.6
Intelligent tutoring systems have long enabled automated immediate feedback on student work when it is presented in a tightly structured format and when problems are very constrained, but reliably assessing free-form mathematical reasoning remains challenging. We present a system that processes free-form natural language input, handles a wide range of edge cases, and comments competently not only on the technical correctness of submitted proofs, but also on style and presentation issues. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to the evaluation of such a system, and show that by the metrics we evaluate, the quality of the feedback generated is comparable to that produced by human experts when assessing early undergraduate homework. We stress-test our system with a small set of more advanced and unusual questions, and report both significant gaps and encouraging successes in that more challenging setting. Our system uses large language models in a modular workflow. The workflow configuration is human-readable and editable without programming knowledge, and allows some intermediate steps to be precomputed or injected by the instructor. A version of our tool is deployed on the Imperial mathematics homework platform Lambdafeedback. We report also on the integration of our tool into this platform.
title Automated Feedback Generation for Undergraduate Mathematics: Development and Evaluation of an AI Teaching Assistant
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
97U70, 97C70, 68T50, 68T07
F.4.1; I.2.7; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03458