Oscar Heath | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Correcting Mode Collapse in Silicon Sampling with Semantic Similarity Rating

Silicon sampling refers to the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate responses to surveys. It has shown promise, but tends to generate response distributions with unrealistically low variance. We argue that this mode collapse is due to LLMs failure to generate numeric data, and that text responses may be better suited for this task. We analyze whether Semantic Similarity Rating can improve the fidelity of silicon sampling responses when asked about political attitudes. This method solicits text-only responses from LLMs, then maps this to a numeric scale using text embeddings. We find that this method both improves the fidelity of silicon sampling response distributions, and has few parameters to calibrate.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Systematic Review of Academic Procrastination Interventions in Computing Higher Education

Academic procrastination is a persistent challenge in computing education, yet evidence on the effectiveness of course-level interventions remains fragmented across diverse designs and contexts. We present a systematic literature review of studies published in the past decade that empirically examine interventions to reduce academic procrastination among post-secondary computing students. Evidence from 19 articles examines interventions that target procrastination through structural, feedback-based, motivational, and self-regulatory mechanisms. Our findings suggest that interventions introducing clear temporal structure consistently promote earlier starts and more distributed work, which act as key mediators of performance gains. The magnitude of these gains depends strongly on task structure, with greater benefits for long-horizon, multi-step assignments than for short, routine tasks. Moreover, supportive designs reliably outperform punitive or restrictive schemes, while uniform interventions yield uneven benefits across students. This review highlights the importance of designing structured, supportive, and personalized interventions to address procrastination in computing education.

cs.CY↗