REVIEW 5 major objections 7 minor 30 references
Advancing Student Writing Through Automated Syntax Feedback
T0 review · 5 major / 7 minor · reviewed 2026-08-10 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Fine-tuning turns open LLMs into useful essay syntax tutors
desk verdict The dataset is a useful, public resource; the performance claim needs a blinded, error-level evaluation before I'd trust it. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the Essay-Syntax-Instruct dataset: 8,320 essay–feedback pairs built from ASAP essays after GPT-3.5 replaced anonymized placeholders, with feedback generated by a GPT-3.5-Turbo prompt that checks seven syntax categories (misspelled words, conjunctions and linking phrases, modifiers, prepositions, modal verbs, punctuation, articles) and reports each error with a corrected version or writes N/A. Fine-tuning uses LoRA (r=32, alpha=64) for three epochs at a 3e-4 learning rate, and evaluation combines ROUGE scores against GPT-3.5's feedback with human ratings from a five-tier A–E scale. The dataset's structured format is what teaches the models to output feedback that is both formatted and substantively aligned.
What would settle it
Take a held-out set of student essays, have expert writing instructors independently identify every syntax error and correction in the seven categories, and compare the fine-tuned models' feedback against those expert annotations. If the fine-tuned models recover the expert corrections no more often than their base versions do—or if human raters who are blind to which model produced the feedback see no quality difference—then the paper's central claim of improvement would be refuted.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that base chat models produce noisy, often misformatted syntax feedback, and that a modest amount of instruction fine-tuning on this dataset substantially corrects that behavior. After fine-tuning, the models' generated feedback follows the requested seven-category structure more faithfully, repeats fewer errors across categories, and earns higher human ratings; for example, Mistral-7B's B ratings rose from 10.33% to 65.67% and its D ratings fell from 43.33% to 4.00%. The paper treats the Essay-Syntax-Instruct dataset, with its structured error-correction format, as the mechanism that induces this improvement.
Load-bearing premise
The training labels and the evaluation reference both come from GPT-3.5, whose own feedback earned only 29% A and 63.3% B ratings in the paper's human check; if that teacher makes systematic syntax mistakes, fine-tuning will bake them in and ROUGE will reward imitation rather than correction.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Schools and districts can deploy the released Llama-2 and Mistral checkpoints locally to give students immediate, structured syntax feedback without sending essays to a commercial API.
- The dataset provides a new benchmark for syntax feedback generation, letting future models be compared on the same essay set and rating rubric.
- The observed shift from D-level to B-level outputs suggests that instruction tuning on structured error-correction data is an effective general recipe for feedback tasks, not just for syntax.
- Researchers can reuse the pipeline—ASAP essays, placeholder replacement, GPT-generated feedback, human vetting—to build similar datasets for other writing dimensions such as coherence or argument strength.
- The fine-tuned models' higher ROUGE and human ratings imply that even small 7B-parameter models can serve as practical feedback generators when the training data is well structured.
Reading between the lines
- Because the same GPT-3.5 model generated the training labels and serves as the ROUGE reference, part of the measured gain may reflect imitation of the teacher's style rather than objectively better corrections; an independent expert-labeled gold set would separate the two.
- The human evaluation suggests a ceiling set by the teacher: even the best fine-tuned model reached only 4.67% A ratings, roughly the rate at which the teacher itself was rated A on the same scale, so improving the teacher (or adding expert corrections) may be the next bottleneck.
- A natural testable extension would be a classroom study measuring whether students who receive this feedback show measurable syntax gains over a semester; the paper lists this as future work, but it is the decisive practical test.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces Essay-Syntax-Instruct, a dataset of student essays from ASAP with syntax feedback generated by GPT-3.5-Turbo under a seven-category prompt, after placeholder replacement. It reports a human quality check of 300 generated feedback samples (29% A, 63.3% B) and uses the dataset to fine-tune Llama-2-7B, Llama-2-13B, and Mistral-7B with LoRA. Evaluation is based on ROUGE scores against GPT-3.5 feedback and on human ratings of base versus fine-tuned outputs. The paper's central claim is that fine-tuning with this dataset significantly improves the quality of automatic syntax feedback for student essays.
Significance. The dataset and checkpoints are released publicly, which is a useful contribution for the AI-in-education community, and the idea of using LLM-generated structured feedback on authentic student essays is timely. If the reported improvements are genuine, the paper provides a low-cost recipe for building syntax feedback systems from open models. However, the current evidence is conditional: the automatic metric is partly circular, and the human evaluation is not yet shown to measure error-identification quality independently of format adherence. The significance of the work therefore depends on whether the authors can strengthen the evaluation with agreement metrics, significance tests, and an error-level analysis.
major comments (5)
- [Section 4.2, Table 1] The ROUGE evaluation compares model outputs against GPT-3.5-Turbo feedback that also served as the fine-tuning target. Since the fine-tuned models are trained to imitate that teacher, higher ROUGE-1/2/L after fine-tuning is expected and does not by itself demonstrate improved syntax feedback quality. The text acknowledges that ROUGE is unreliable, but the paper still presents the gains as supportive; please reframe Table 1 as a fidelity-to-teacher measure or replace it with an evaluation on a human-authored gold standard.
- [Section 4.2, Table 2 and Figure 7] The human evaluation has no inter-annotator agreement, no significance testing, and no evidence of blinding, and the rating rubric explicitly rewards a structured approach. The post-fine-tuning gains are concentrated in Rating B (e.g., Mistral from 10.33% to 65.67%) while Rating A stays nearly flat (4.00% to 4.67%), which is consistent with the hypothesis that fine-tuning improves format adherence rather than error identification. To support the central claim, report per-rater distributions and agreement (e.g., Cohen's kappa), perform significance tests, and ideally evaluate at the level of individual errors (precision/recall of flagged errors against a gold standard).
- [Section 4.2, Figure 7] The figure legend names 'gemma2 7b' and 'llama3.1 8b', models that are never mentioned in the methodology or results text, while Table 2 reports Llama2 and Mistral. This prevents the reader from knowing which bars correspond to which fine-tuned model. Please correct the figure or align its labels with the model names used throughout the paper.
- [Sections 3.1 and 4.1] The paper says the 300 annotated instances were used as the test set, and later describes human evaluation on a 'subset of 300 essays from the test dataset.' It is not stated explicitly whether these are the same 300 essays. Please clarify the split and state, for the human evaluation, whether the raters saw the same essays as those used in the dataset quality check; this is needed to interpret the comparison.
- [Section 3.1] The quality check of the training data shows only 29% Rating A and 63.3% Rating B for GPT-3.5 feedback. Because the fine-tuning target contains a substantial amount of imperfect feedback, the paper should analyze whether systematic teacher errors are propagated by the fine-tuned models. A minimal addition would be a breakdown of the low-rated feedback by syntax category and a qualitative check of whether such errors reappear in the fine-tuned outputs.
minor comments (7)
- [Throughout] The paper repeatedly writes 'ROGUE scores' where the metric is ROUGE; please correct this throughout, starting in Section 3.1.
- [Introduction and Related Work] There are typographical errors in model names, including 'LLlama-2-13b-chat-hf' and 'LLlama-2-chat-hf'; please proofread all model names.
- [Figure 7] The legend contains the typo 'mistal 7b FT'; it should be 'Mistral 7b FT'.
- [Section 3.1] The phrase 'we randomly selected a sample of clues' should be 'a sample of essays' or 'a sample of feedback instances'.
- [Section 4.1] The sentence 'model distribution sampling facilitated clue generation' is unclear; it should be rewritten as, for example, 'output generation'.
- [Abstract] The final word 'Students' is capitalized; it should be lowercase.
- [Related Work] The related work does not discuss grammatical error correction (GEC) systems or widely used grammar feedback tools; adding a brief positioning paragraph would help readers understand the contribution relative to existing writing-support technology.
Circularity Check
ROUGE gains reduce to teacher imitation because GPT-3.5 is both the training target and the evaluation reference; the human evaluation is independent but does not rescue the automatic metric.
-
fitted input called prediction
[Section 4.1 (Experimental Setup, Data) and Section 4.2 (Automatic Evaluation)]
"For evaluation purposes, we designated the 300 annotated instances as a testing set and assessed all our models using GPT-3.5 Turbo as a reference point. The training was conducted with the other 8,020 examples. ... We attempted to calculate the ROUGE scores between the generated feedback from GPT-3.5-Turbo and other models, which we utilized for fine-tuning in two distinct scenarios: the base model before fine-tuning and the fine-tuned model afterward, using the Essay-Syntax-Instruct dataset."
The models are fine-tuned to maximize likelihood of GPT-3.5-generated syntax feedback on Essay-Syntax-Instruct training examples. The automatic evaluation then computes ROUGE between each model's output and GPT-3.5's feedback on held-out instances from the same dataset and prompt. ROUGE is word-overlap with the teacher, and the fine-tuned models are explicitly trained to imitate that teacher, so a rise in ROUGE after fine-tuning is statistically forced and measures teacher imitation rather than syntax-feedback quality. Table 1 is presented as 'Performance of base LLMs and fine-tuned LLMs using the Essay-Syntax-Instruct,' making this a fitted input reported as a prediction.
full rationale
The derivation chain is: GPT-3.5 generates the Essay-Syntax-Instruct feedback; the same GPT-3.5 outputs are used as supervised training targets for fine-tuning; the automatic evaluation compares base and fine-tuned outputs against GPT-3.5 as the reference. The ROUGE improvement in Table 1 therefore reduces by construction to imitation fidelity and cannot, by itself, support the paper's central claim that fine-tuning improves syntax feedback quality. The paper even concedes that ROUGE 'may not be highly reliable' and that feedback could 'differ from the assessments provided by GPT3.5-Turbo.' The human evaluation (Table 2, Figure 7) is genuinely external to the teacher and provides some independent evidence for the fine-tuning benefit, so the paper is not wholly circular. However, the human ratings use the same rubric that rewards a structured format, are based on two master's students without reported inter-annotator agreement or blinding, and do not compare fine-tuned models against GPT-3.5 itself, so the independent support is weaker than the text implies. No load-bearing self-citations were found; references to prior work are standard external citations. Overall, one 'prediction' (ROUGE gain) is circular, while the central claim retains independent but imperfect human-evaluation content, giving a partial-circularity score of 6.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (5)
- Essay length filter bounds =
100 to 700 words
- GPT-3.5 generation temperature =
0.3
- LoRA rank and alpha =
r=32, alpha=64
- Training epochs and batch size =
3 epochs, batch size 16
- Learning rate and sampling parameters =
lr=3e-4, top-p=0.95, top-k=50
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption GPT-3.5-Turbo-generated feedback is an accurate enough target for training and evaluation.
- domain assumption The seven selected syntax categories cover the relevant space of syntax errors.
- domain assumption Two master's-level linguistics raters on 300 essays provide a reliable quality signal.
- domain assumption ASAP essays are representative of the target student population.
- domain assumption Placeholder replacement by GPT-3.5 preserves the syntax errors that feedback should target.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Advancing Student Writing Through Automated Syntax Feedback." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/TKUECHAR
@misc{pith2026250107740,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Advancing Student Writing Through Automated Syntax Feedback},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/TKUECHAR}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2501.07740}
}
read the original abstract
This study underscores the pivotal role of syntax feedback in augmenting the syntactic proficiency of students. Recognizing the challenges faced by learners in mastering syntactic nuances, we introduce a specialized dataset named Essay-Syntax-Instruct designed to enhance the understanding and application of English syntax among these students. Leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT3.5-Turbo, Llama-2-7b-chat-hf, Llama-2-13b-chat-hf, and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2, this work embarks on a comprehensive fine-tuning process tailored to the syntax improvement task. Through meticulous evaluation, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned LLMs exhibit a marked improvement in addressing syntax-related challenges, thereby serving as a potent tool for students to identify and rectify their syntactic errors. The findings not only highlight the effectiveness of the proposed dataset in elevating the performance of LLMs for syntax enhancement but also illuminate a promising path for utilizing advanced language models to support language acquisition efforts. This research contributes to the broader field of language learning technology by showcasing the potential of LLMs in facilitating the linguistic development of Students.
Figures
Figures from the paper (4 more)
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Ramesh, D. & Sanampudi, S. An automated essay scoring systems: a system- atic literature review.Artificial Intelligence Review. 55, 2495-2527 (2022)
work page 2022
-
[2]
Miltsakaki, E. & Kukich, K. Evaluation of text coherence for electronic essay scoring systems.Natural Language Engineering. 10, 25-55 (2004)
work page 2004
- [3]
- [4]
-
[5]
Pennington, J., Socher, R. & Manning, C. Glove: Global vectors for word representation. Proceedings Of The 2014 Conference On Empirical Methods In Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). pp. 1532-1543 (2014)
work page 2014
-
[6]
Sultan,M.,Salazar,C.&Sumner,T.Fastandeasyshortanswergradingwith high accuracy.Proceedings Of The 2016 Conference Of The North American Chapter Of The Association For Computational Linguistics: Human Lan- guage Technologies. pp. 1070-1075 (2016)
work page 2016
- [7]
-
[8]
Salim, Y., Stevanus, V., Barlian, E., Sari, A. & Suhartono, D. Automated English digital essay grader using machine learning. 2019 IEEE Interna- tional Conference On Engineering, Technology And Education (TALE). pp. 1-6 (2019)
work page 2019
Show all 30 references
-
[9]
& Zhang, Y
Dong, F. & Zhang, Y. Automatic features for essay scoring–an empirical study.Proceedings Of The 2016 Conference On Empirical Methods In Natural Language Processing. pp. 1072-1077 (2016)
2016
-
[10]
Taghipour, K. & Ng, H. A neural approach to automated essay scoring. Proceedings Of The 2016 Conference On Empirical Methods In Natural Lan- guage Processing. pp. 1882-1891 (2016)
2016
-
[11]
& Lee, C
Riordan, B., Horbach, A., Cahill, A., Zesch, T. & Lee, C. Investigating neu- ral architectures for short answer scoring.Proceedings Of The 12th Workshop On Innovative Use Of NLP For Building Educational Applications. pp. 159- 168 (2017)
2017
-
[12]
& Ormerod, C
Rodriguez, P., Jafari, A. & Ormerod, C. Language models and automated essay scoring.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:1909.09482. (2019)
2019 arXiv
-
[13]
34, 13389-13396 (2020)
Lun,J.,Zhu,J.,Tang,Y.&Yang,M.Multipledataaugmentationstrategies for improving performance on automatic short answer scoring.Proceedings Of The AAAI Conference On Artificial Intelligence. 34, 13389-13396 (2020)
2020
-
[14]
& Toutanova, K
Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K. & Toutanova, K. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:1810.04805. (2018) 16 K. Zeinalipour et al
2018 arXiv
-
[15]
Yang, R., Cao, J., Wen, Z., Wu, Y. & He, X. Enhancing automated es- say scoring performance via fine-tuning pre-trained language models with combination of regression and ranking. Findings Of The Association For Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020. pp. 1560-1569 (2020)
2020
-
[16]
& Lin, H
Wang, Y., Wang, C., Li, R. & Lin, H. On the use of bert for automated essay scoring: Joint learning of multi-scale essay representation.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2205.03835. (2022)
2022 arXiv
-
[17]
& Eguchi, M
Mizumoto, A. & Eguchi, M. Exploring the potential of using an AI language model for automated essay scoring.Research Methods In Applied Linguistics. 2, 100050 (2023)
2023
-
[18]
& Burstein, J
Naismith, B., Mulcaire, P. & Burstein, J. Automated evaluation of written discourse coherence using GPT-4. Proceedings Of The 18th Workshop On Innovative Use Of NLP For Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023). pp. 394-403 (2023)
2023
-
[19]
& Burstein, J
Yancey, K., Laflair, G., Verardi, A. & Burstein, J. Rating short l2 essays on the cefr scale with gpt-4.Proceedings Of The 18th Workshop On Innovative Use Of NLP For Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023). pp. 576-584 (2023)
2023
-
[20]
& Gašević, D
Yan, L., Sha, L., Zhao, L., Li, Y., Martinez-Maldonado, R., Chen, G., Li, X., Jin, Y. & Gašević, D. Practical and ethical challenges of large language models in education: A systematic scoping review.British Journal Of Edu- cational Technology. 55, 90-112 (2024)
2024
-
[21]
& Others ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language mod- elsforeducation
Kasneci, E., Seßler, K., Küchemann, S., Bannert, M., Dementieva, D., Fis- cher, F., Gasser, U., Groh, G., Günnemann, S., Hüllermeier, E. & Others ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language mod- elsforeducation. Learning And Individual Differences.103pp...
2023
-
[22]
& Others Check your facts and try again: Improving large language models with external knowledge and automated feedback
Peng, B., Galley, M., He, P., Cheng, H., Xie, Y., Hu, Y., Huang, Q., Liden, L., Yu, Z., Chen, W. & Others Check your facts and try again: Improving large language models with external knowledge and automated feedback. ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2302.12813. (2023)
2023 arXiv
-
[23]
& Others Fabric: Automated scoring and feedback genera- tion for essays.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2310.05191
Han, J., Yoo, H., Myung, J., Kim, M., Lim, H., Kim, Y., Lee, T., Hong, H., Kim, J., Ahn, S. & Others Fabric: Automated scoring and feedback genera- tion for essays.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2310.05191. (2023)
2023 arXiv
-
[24]
& Ha- jishirzi, H
Wang, Y., Kordi, Y., Mishra, S., Liu, A., Smith, N., Khashabi, D. & Ha- jishirzi, H. Self-instruct: Aligning language models with self-generated in- structions. ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2212.10560. (2022)
2022 arXiv
-
[25]
& Others Mistral 7B
Jiang, A., Sablayrolles, A., Mensch, A., Bamford, C., Chaplot, D., Casas, D., Bressand, F., Lengyel, G., Lample, G., Saulnier, L. & Others Mistral 7B. ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2310.06825. (2023)
2023 arXiv
-
[26]
Rasley, J., Rajbhandari, S., Ruwase, O. & He, Y. Deepspeed: System opti- mizations enable training deep learning models with over 100 billion param- eters. Proceedings Of The 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference On Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining. pp. 3505-3506 (2020)
2020
-
[27]
Flashattention-2: Faster attention with better parallelism and work partitioning
Dao, T. Flashattention-2: Faster attention with better parallelism and work partitioning. ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2307.08691. (2023) Advancing Student Writing Through Automated Syntax Feedback 17
2023 arXiv
-
[28]
& Chen, W
Hu, E., Shen, Y., Wallis, P., Allen-Zhu, Z., Li, Y., Wang, S., Wang, L. & Chen, W. Lora: Low-rank adaptation of large language models.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2106.09685. (2021)
2021 arXiv
-
[29]
Xiao, C., Ma, W., Xu, S., Zhang, K., Wang, Y. & Fu, Q. From Automation to Augmentation: Large Language Models Elevating Essay Scoring Land- scape. ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2401.06431. (2024)
2024 arXiv
-
[30]
& Others Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2307.09288
Touvron, H., Martin, L., Stone, K., Albert, P., Almahairi, A., Babaei, Y., Bashlykov, N., Batra, S., Bhargava, P., Bhosale, S. & Others Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models.ArXiv Preprint arXiv:2307.09288. (2023)
2023 arXiv
Reviewed August 10, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.