Learnable Assessment Skills for LLM-based Automated Scoring: Rubric Construction via Iterative Optimization
About
LLM-based automated scoring approaches near-human performance, but scaling to new tasks remains bottlenecked by the per-item human configuration of upstream stages such as rubric construction. Human experts bypass this bottleneck through evaluation heuristics developed over extensive practice. We ask whether LLMs can learn similar heuristics directly from scoring experience, and formalize this as the concept of assessment skills: item-independent natural-language procedural knowledge that guides LLMs through specific stages of the scoring workflow. Focusing on rubric construction as a first instantiation, we propose an iterative framework that decomposes a skill into a fixed scaffold and learnable item-agnostic rules, refining the rules through LLM-driven diagnosis of scoring errors and validation-gated selection. The framework requires no expert-written rubric. On all ten ASAP-SAS items, optimized skills substantially improve LLM-based scoring and frequently surpass the dataset-provided expert rubric. Cross-item transfer experiments further reveal that learned skills capture both generalizable and item-specific patterns.