EduFair-Bench: Evaluating Pedagogical Fairness of LLM Tutors Across Student Demographics

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12949v1
• Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:10:07 GMT
• Title: EduFair-Bench: Evaluating Pedagogical Fairness of LLM Tutors Across Student Demographics
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as tutors, but it is unclear whether they support all students equally well.<n>We introduce textbfEduFair-Bench, a benchmark for auditing the pedagogical fairness of LLM tutors.
• Score: 7.575642125191585
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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