Investigating Automatic Scoring and Feedback using Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that quantized large language models, fine-tuned with PEFT methods, can accurately score and generate feedback for short answers and essays, reducing computational costs and latency.

Contribution

It introduces the use of PEFT-based quantized LLMs for automatic grading and feedback, showing high accuracy and efficiency in these tasks.

Findings

Prediction error less than 3% on grade scores

Quantized LLaMA-2 13B outperforms base models in feedback quality

Effective for both proprietary and open-source datasets

Abstract

Automatic grading and feedback have been long studied using traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques using language models. With the recent accessibility to high performing large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA-2, there is an opportunity to investigate the use of these LLMs for automatic grading and feedback generation. Despite the increase in performance, LLMs require significant computational resources for fine-tuning and additional specific adjustments to enhance their performance for such tasks. To address these issues, Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA and QLoRA, have been adopted to decrease memory and computational requirements in model fine-tuning. This paper explores the efficacy of PEFT-based quantized models, employing classification or regression head, to fine-tune LLMs for automatically assigning continuous numerical grades to short answers and essays, as well as generating corresponding feedback. We conducted experiments on both proprietary and open-source datasets for our tasks. The results show that prediction of grade scores via finetuned LLMs are highly accurate, achieving less than 3% error in grade percentage on average. For providing graded feedback fine-tuned 4-bit quantized LLaMA-2 13B models outperform competitive base models and achieve high similarity with subject matter expert feedback in terms of high BLEU and ROUGE scores and qualitatively in terms of feedback. The findings from this study provide important insights into the impacts of the emerging capabilities of using quantization approaches to fine-tune LLMs for various downstream tasks, such as automatic short answer scoring and feedback generation at comparatively lower costs and latency.