MSA at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Disagreement-Aware Instruction Tuning for Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of LLMs as Math Tutors

Baraa Hikal, Mohmaed Basem, Islam Oshallah, Ali Hamdi


Abstract
We present MSA-MathEval, our submission to the BEA 2025 Shared Task on evaluating AI tutor responses across four instructional dimensions: Mistake Identification, Mistake Location, Providing Guidance, and Actionability. Our approach uses a unified training pipeline to fine-tune a single instruction-tuned language model across all tracks, without any task-specific architectural changes. To improve prediction reliability, we introduce a disagreement-aware ensemble inference strategy that enhances coverage of minority labels. Our system achieves strong performance across all tracks, ranking 1st in Providing Guidance, 3rd in Actionability, and 4th in both Mistake Identification and Mistake Location. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of scalable instruction tuning and disagreement-driven modeling for robust, multi-dimensional evaluation of LLMs as educational tutors.
Anthology ID:
2025.bea-1.95
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Bashar Alhafni, Marie Bexte, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan
Venues:
BEA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1194–1202
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.95/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Baraa Hikal, Mohmaed Basem, Islam Oshallah, and Ali Hamdi. 2025. MSA at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Disagreement-Aware Instruction Tuning for Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of LLMs as Math Tutors. In Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025), pages 1194–1202, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MSA at BEA 2025 Shared Task: Disagreement-Aware Instruction Tuning for Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of LLMs as Math Tutors (Hikal et al., BEA 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.bea-1.95.pdf