Examining the Behavior of LLM Architectures Within the Framework of Standardized National Exams in Brazil

TL;DR

This study compares the performance and linguistic features of GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and MariTalk with Brazilian students on the ENEM exam to assess biases and differences in answer distributions and essay styles.

Contribution

It provides a novel analysis of LLMs in the context of Brazilian standardized exams, highlighting differences in answer patterns and linguistic characteristics compared to human students.

Findings

LLMs show no significant bias compared to humans based on answer accuracy.

Model essays differ from human essays in word choice and sentence structure.

LLMs' outputs do not closely resemble any specific human socioeconomic group.

Abstract

The Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM) is a pivotal test for Brazilian students, required for admission to a significant number of universities in Brazil. The test consists of four objective high-school level tests on Math, Humanities, Natural Sciences and Languages, and one writing essay. Students' answers to the test and to the accompanying socioeconomic status questionnaire are made public every year (albeit anonymized) due to transparency policies from the Brazilian Government. In the context of large language models (LLMs), these data lend themselves nicely to comparing different groups of humans with AI, as we can have access to human and machine answer distributions. We leverage these characteristics of the ENEM dataset and compare GPT-3.5 and 4, and MariTalk, a model trained using Portuguese data, to humans, aiming to ascertain how their answers relate to real societal groups and what that may reveal about the model biases. We divide the human groups by using socioeconomic status (SES), and compare their answer distribution with LLMs for each question and for the essay. We find no significant biases when comparing LLM performance to humans on the multiple-choice Brazilian Portuguese tests, as the distance between model and human answers is mostly determined by the human accuracy. A similar conclusion is found by looking at the generated text as, when analyzing the essays, we observe that human and LLM essays differ in a few key factors, one being the choice of words where model essays were easily separable from human ones. The texts also differ syntactically, with LLM generated essays exhibiting, on average, smaller sentences and less thought units, among other differences. These results suggest that, for Brazilian Portuguese in the ENEM context, LLM outputs represent no group of humans, being significantly different from the answers from Brazilian students across all tests.