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Which Type Of Students Can Llms Act? Investigating Authentic Simulation With Graph-Based Human-Ai Collaborative System

Date
Publisher
arXiv
While rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) are reshaping data-driven intelligent education, accurately simulating students remains an important but challenging bottleneck for scalable educational data collection, evaluation, and intervention design. However, current works are limited by scarce real interaction data, costly expert evaluation for realism, and a lack of large-scale, systematic analyses of LLMs ability in simulating students. We address this gap by presenting a three-stage LLM-human collaborative pipeline to automatically generate and filter high-quality student agents. We leverage a two-round automated scoring validated by human experts and deploy a score propagation module to obtain more consistent scores across the student similarity graph. Experiments show that combining automated scoring, expert calibration, and graph-based propagation yields simulated student that more closely track authentication by human judgments. We then analyze which profiles and behaviors are simulated more faithfully, supporting subsequent studies on personalized learning and educational assessment.
Study at a glance
  • Question: Which student types and behaviors can large language models reliably simulate in academic advising contexts?
  • Setting and data: 559 synthetic student profiles, 2,236 automated dialogues, and 17 candidate agents evaluated by experienced university educational experts in China across 765 dialogue turns.
  • Method: System development of a three-stage human-AI pipeline combining two-round automated scoring, graph-based score propagation, and expert interactive testing.
Why it matters

Simulating students accurately remains difficult because real interaction data is scarce, expert evaluation is costly, and language models tend to display unrealistically competent or overly positive behavior when portraying learners with academic difficulties.

Key findings
  • Propagating scores across a similarity graph aligned automated evaluations closer to human ratings, reducing scoring errors by 30.63% for profiles and 50.11% for behaviors.
  • Simulations more faithfully portrayed students with low extraversion, high agreeableness, test-taking difficulties, and strong self-efficacy or self-regulation.
  • Individual profile traits had limited single-feature importance on final consistency scores, indicating that complex interactions between multiple traits primarily determine simulation realism.

Summary drafted with AI from the full paper and may contain errors. See the full paper for details.

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