Can LLMs Really Understand Item Difficulty Levels? Implications for Automated Item Generation Using LLMs

arXiv:2607.28634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The estimation of item difficulty plays a key role in both formative assessment and large-scale high-stakes summative assessments. This study explores how large language models (LLMs) perform in predicting item difficulty levels using items from a large-scale Reading and Writing test. The study investigated various prompting strategies and parameter settings across multiple LLMs. LLM performance was compared with encoder-only language models and fe...