Evaluating Logical Error Sensitivity in Text-Only Proxies for Generated Science Rubrics

Automatically generated marking rubrics could reduce assessment-authoring effort, but educational usefulness depends on whether evaluation detects criteria that would misgrade student responses, not only fluent paraphrases. This study examines that measurement problem in a public, text-only proxy testbed built from SciQ support explanations; the references are constructed proxies, not educator-authored rubrics. A locally served Qwen3-14B instruction model generated two-point rubrics for 120 held-out science questions under three decoding seeds and was compared with answer-only, retrieval-edit, and reference-template controls. Its outputs contained the supplied answer on 0.992 of items, while support-concept coverage was 0.263 to 0.268 and point-F1 was 0.434 to 0.436. An answer-only baseline reached point-F1 0.547 under the same constructed metric. Deliberately negated rubrics still had lexical cosine 0.901 and ROUGE-L 0.849; the concept metric remained 0.724 because polarity was not represented. Across 360 model generations, reference-similarity scores correlated with point-F1. These corruption tests are not calibrated acceptance decisions, but they show that aggregate association is insufficient evidence of logical sensitivity. The study provides code, data hashes, raw generations, repeated-seed estimates, and controlled corruptions for developing evaluation protocols that test negation, omission, irrelevant support, and unsupported generic language.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-10-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23782006
Primary Topic
Educational Technology and Assessment
Type
preprint
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preprint

Evaluating Logical Error Sensitivity in Text-Only Proxies for Generated Science Rubrics

Lauren Mercer, Maya Kalyani Reed, Hoang Justin Tran, Alexander J. Garnier
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Educational Technology and Assessment
preprint

Evaluating Logical Error Sensitivity in Text-Only Proxies for Generated Science Rubrics

Lauren Mercer, Maya Kalyani Reed, Hoang Justin Tran, Alexander J. Garnier
preprint en

Abstract

Automatically generated marking rubrics could reduce assessment-authoring effort, but educational usefulness depends on whether evaluation detects criteria that would misgrade student responses, not only fluent paraphrases. This study examines that measurement problem in a public, text-only proxy testbed built from SciQ support explanations; the references are constructed proxies, not educator-authored rubrics. A locally served Qwen3-14B instruction model generated two-point rubrics for 120 held-out science questions under three decoding seeds and was compared with answer-only, retrieval-edit, and reference-template controls. Its outputs contained the supplied answer on 0.992 of items, while support-concept coverage was 0.263 to 0.268 and point-F1 was 0.434 to 0.436. An answer-only baseline reached point-F1 0.547 under the same constructed metric. Deliberately negated rubrics still had lexical cosine 0.901 and ROUGE-L 0.849; the concept metric remained 0.724 because polarity was not represented. Across 360 model generations, reference-similarity scores correlated with point-F1. These corruption tests are not calibrated acceptance decisions, but they show that aggregate association is insufficient evidence of logical sensitivity. The study provides code, data hashes, raw generations, repeated-seed estimates, and controlled corruptions for developing evaluation protocols that test negation, omission, irrelevant support, and unsupported generic language.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Simon Fraser University (CA), Concordia University (CA), University of Missouri (US), Université Grenoble Alpes (FR)
Educational Technology and Assessment
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