Assessing Educational Quality: Comparative Analysis of Crowdsourced, Expert, and AI-Driven Rubric Applications

Exposing students to low-quality assessments such as multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and short answer questions (SAQs) is detrimental to their learning, making it essential to accurately evaluate these assessments. Existing evaluation methods are often challenging to scale and fail to consider their pedagogical value within course materials. Online crowds offer a scalable and cost-effective source of intelligence, but often lack necessary domain expertise. Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation and scalability, but may also lack precise domain knowledge. To explore these trade-offs, we compare the effectiveness and reliability of crowdsourced and LLM-based methods for assessing the quality of 30 MCQs and SAQs across six educational domains using two standardized evaluation rubrics. We analyzed the performance of 84 crowdworkers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Prolific, comparing their quality evaluations to those made by the three LLMs: GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3 Opus. We found that crowdworkers on Prolific consistently delivered the highest-quality assessments, and GPT-4 emerged as the most effective LLM for this task. Our study reveals that while traditional crowdsourced methods often yield more accurate assessments, LLMs can match this accuracy in specific evaluative criteria. These results provide evidence for a hybrid approach to educational content evaluation, integrating the scalability of AI with the nuanced judgment of humans. We offer feasibility considerations in using AI to supplement human judgment in educational assessment.