The Architect, the Adversary, and the Judge: Closed-Loop Generation of Standards-Aligned Assessment Items at Scale

Abstract

We present CLAIM, a production pipeline for K-12 assessment-item generation coupling a two-stage generate-then-attack protocol (the model drafts as a "curriculum architect", then re-enters the same conversation as a hostile adversarial reviewer), bi-directional few-shot conditioning on accepted and rejected items, the latter carrying the evaluator's diagnosis, and a knowledge dictionary of 44,844 error-correction rules mined from that feedback and retrieved per standard and item type. Across 43,227 scored items over 755 Common Core ELA standards, three item types, and ten LLMs, the pipeline reaches a 97.8% expert-evaluator pass rate on a 9,074-item production run. We then ask what that rate certifies. Re-scoring a stratified sample with three judges from other vendors, blind to the deployed verdict, reproduces the format ordering under every judge and recovers a larger open-set deficit than the deployed evaluator does; but agreement on the accept/reject binary is weak at production prevalence (kappa about 0.13), and the judges agree with each other no better. The level is therefore judge-relative, and with no student-response data our quality evidence is evaluator-judged throughout. The corpus also exposes a robust asymmetry. Multiple-choice and multiple-select generation saturate at 98% or above for both frontier models under a dozen static rules, whereas fill-in-the-blank generation is capability-tiered (82.8-96.7% across five models under a matched rule set, standards, and judge) and plateaus under prompt-only optimization, with error mass shifting between answer-key over-inclusion and omission as rules accumulate. We analyze this as open-set boundary determination, a task autoregressive decoders are structurally ill-equipped to solve, and show the asymmetry recurring when the evaluator itself is distilled: fail-recall rises from 8% to 63% while F1 saturates at 0.25.