EduGuardBench: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating the Pedagogical Fidelity and Adversarial Safety of LLMs as Simulated Teachers
This work addresses the challenge of ensuring professional competence and ethical safety for LLMs deployed as teachers in personalized education, providing a holistic benchmark for assessing role-playing fidelity and safety vulnerabilities.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating the pedagogical fidelity and adversarial safety of large language models (LLMs) used as simulated teachers by proposing EduGuardBench, a benchmark that revealed a polarization in performance among 14 models, with reasoning-oriented models showing superior fidelity but incompetence as a dominant failure mode, and identified a counterintuitive scaling paradox where mid-sized models were most vulnerable.
Large Language Models for Simulating Professions (SP-LLMs), particularly as teachers, are pivotal for personalized education. However, ensuring their professional competence and ethical safety is a critical challenge, as existing benchmarks fail to measure role-playing fidelity or address the unique teaching harms inherent in educational scenarios. To address this, we propose EduGuardBench, a dual-component benchmark. It assesses professional fidelity using a Role-playing Fidelity Score (RFS) while diagnosing harms specific to the teaching profession. It also probes safety vulnerabilities using persona-based adversarial prompts targeting both general harms and, particularly, academic misconduct, evaluated with metrics including Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a three-tier Refusal Quality assessment. Our extensive experiments on 14 leading models reveal a stark polarization in performance. While reasoning-oriented models generally show superior fidelity, incompetence remains the dominant failure mode across most models. The adversarial tests uncovered a counterintuitive scaling paradox, where mid-sized models can be the most vulnerable, challenging monotonic safety assumptions. Critically, we identified a powerful Educational Transformation Effect: the safest models excel at converting harmful requests into teachable moments by providing ideal Educational Refusals. This capacity is strongly negatively correlated with ASR, revealing a new dimension of advanced AI safety. EduGuardBench thus provides a reproducible framework that moves beyond siloed knowledge tests toward a holistic assessment of professional, ethical, and pedagogical alignment, uncovering complex dynamics essential for deploying trustworthy AI in education. See https://github.com/YL1N/EduGuardBench for Materials.