EduFair-Bench: Evaluating Pedagogical Fairness of LLM Tutors Across Student Demographics
TL;DR
EduFair-Bench is introduced, a benchmark for auditing the pedagogical fairness of LLM tutors---whether tutoring quality varies systematically with student demographics, and it is found that model capability and demographic fairness are largely orthogonal.
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as tutors, but it is unclear whether they support all students equally well. We introduce \textbf{EduFair-Bench}, a benchmark for auditing the pedagogical fairness of LLM tutors---whether tutoring quality varies systematically with student demographics. EduFair-Bench pairs a multi-domain question bank (mathematics, physics, chemistry) with a controlled simulation in which a fixed LLM student interacts with each tutor across nine demographic levels spanning four dimensions: gender, immigration background, first language, and socioeconomic status (SES). Tutoring quality is scored on five turn-level pedagogical metrics and four conversation-level dimensions, using an LLM judge validated against three-annotator consensus on 180 tutor turns. Bias is measured via paired Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and bootstrap effect-size confidence intervals. Two ablations (demographic cues conveyed through names; conflicting demographic information between tutor and student) disentangle tutor-driven from student-driven bias. Across five tutors, we find that model capability and demographic fairness are largely orthogonal: the smallest model is the most consistent while the four more capable tutors all exhibit wide demographic gaps with no clear capability-to-fairness ordering, pedagogy-specific RL training redistributes rather than removes bias, and language- and immigration-related cues produce larger gaps than gender- and SES-related cues.
