PhD studentship on Large Language Models for Educational Assessment

Award details

We invite applications for a fully funded PhD studentship provided by the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences at King’s College London. The studentship is a match funding for an EPSRC-funded project on AI-enabled high stakes assessment, awarded to Professor Yulan He, in collaboration with AQA, the UK’s largest examination board.

The EPSRC project aims to develop an explainable AI framework for the automated assessment of open-ended student responses in high-stakes educational settings. Combining insights from cognitive science and advances in large language models (LLMs), the research will explore hybrid AI systems capable of reasoning and providing interpretable, pedagogically-aligned feedback. Furthermore, it will design a new performance evaluation framework for assessing the accuracy and reliability of AI-based marking systems.

For this PhD project, the candidate will focus on developing novel solutions in one or more of the following areas:

• LLM knowledge boundaries: Determining appropriate content scope for AI-generated feedback in educational contexts.
• Model interpretability: Investigating methods to generate causal explanations for LLM decisions using interventions and counterfactuals.
• Multimodal LLM reasoning: Enabling LLMs to handle complex inputs such as diagrams, charts, and figures.
• Subject matter grounding and educational alignment: Aligning AI assessments with subject-specific pedagogical goals and probing student understanding through dialogue.
• Personalised feedback: Building dynamic student profiles and generating tailored and pedagogically-grounded feedback.

The student will work closely with two Postdoctoral Research Associates (PDRAs) appointed for the EPSRC project and will benefit from close collaboration with academic and industry partners.

Award value

Stipend: £22,780 per annum

Tuition fees: £32,400 per annum

Research Training and Support Grant: £1,000 per annum

Eligibility criteria

• Applicants should have an undergraduate degree or MSc in Computer Science or another discipline relevant for their PhD project (e.g. Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or Physics).
• We particularly look for applicants with a first-class degree or distinction at masters.

Application process

To be considered for the position candidates must apply via King’s Apply online application system. Details are available on the Department of Informatics website.

Please apply for Computer Science PhD and indicate Professor Yulan He as the supervisor and quote the project title in your application and all correspondence.

Please ensure to add the following code EPSRCHE2501 in the Funding section of the application form. Please select option 5 ‘I am applying for a funding award or scholarship administered by King’s College London’ and type the code into the ‘Award Scheme Code or Name’ box. Please copy and paste the code exactly.

The selection process will involve a pre-selection on documents and, if selected, will be followed by an invitation to an interview. If successful at the interview, an offer will be provided in due course.

Selection process

Shortlisted applicants will be invited to interview for assessment of their research potential.

Contact Details

If you require support with the application process please contact informatics-pgr@kcl.ac.uk.