Limited structural reliability in public educational prediction benchmarks: a four-dimension audit of seven datasets

Abstract Across seven public educational prediction datasets, three passed all four pre-modeling reliability checks; the remaining four either failed group-aware generalization tests or lacked the provenance metadata needed to run them. One dataset was initially classified as failing but corrected after excluding group-identifier features from the holdout matrix, demonstrating that the audit can distinguish genuine cross-group confounding from feature-encoding artifacts. Each dataset was audited before model optimization using four checks: baseline gap, split instability, null separation, and metadata adequacy under group-aware holdout. The dominant failure mode was not weak iid performance alone but cross-group fragility: in the clearest case, UCI Student declined from iid $$R^2 = 0.242$$ to group-holdout $$R^2 = -0.097$$ , while Higher Ed collapsed from 0.041 to $$-8.79$$ . Increasing model complexity did not remove this pattern: ensemble models improved structurally sound datasets but amplified instability or failed under group holdout on fragile ones. An exploratory cross-dataset comparison further showed that stronger profiles clustered in larger, richer-grouped, performance-proximal datasets, while random-split performance severely overstated deployable signal in fragile datasets. Classification-metric sensitivity analyses reached the same substantive conclusions. The results show that benchmark reliability in educational AI is constrained less by algorithm choice than by data structure, group heterogeneity, and evaluation design. A reusable pre-modeling audit offers a minimum quality gate before public educational datasets support strong benchmark or deployment claims.