Graph-enhanced reasoning networks for explainable robustness scoring in structured question evaluation

Abstract

Ensuring that examination questions are pedagogically sound and aligned with the curriculum remains a key challenge in automated assessment. Most existing approaches focus on answer correctness or surface-level textual similarity, overlooking whether questions genuinely reflect syllabus content, require appropriate reasoning, or maintain structural coherence. This study presents SyllabiQA-RSNet, a syllabus-driven framework for automatically evaluating exam question quality. The model combines DeBERTa—large contextual embeddings with graph attention-based syllabus reasoning, capturing dependencies across syllabus sections and multi-step logical connections between questions and course content. Robustness scoring is formulated as a multi-task problem, with the model simultaneously predicting answers, generating reasoning chains, and producing continuous robustness scores. Evaluation on the SyllabusQA benchmark, comprising 5078 question–answer pairs from 63 university syllabi across STEM and non-STEM fields, demonstrates that SyllabiQA-RSNet substantially outperforms baseline models. It achieved a Pearson correlation of 0.79 and Spearman correlation of 0.76 with reference robustness scores, compared to 0.64 for DeBERTa-only and 0.58 for RoBERTa, while reducing RMSE to 0.082. The framework also enhanced answer prediction, particularly for reasoning-intensive questions, improving Exact Match scores by up to 7.2 points and producing higher-quality reasoning chains (+ 8.3 BLEU-4, + 8.8 ROUGE-L). Ablation studies confirmed the necessity of both syllabus graph reasoning and explicit robustness supervision, with their removal causing up to an 11-point drop in robustness correlation. These results indicate that explicitly modeling syllabus structure is critical for reliable, interpretable assessment of question quality, offering insights beyond simple answer correctness and enabling automated evaluation that aligns closely with pedagogical objectives.