MARS: A Momentum-Aware Adaptive Rating System for Personalized Assessment

Abstract:Adaptive assessment systems personalize learning by estimating learner proficiency and recommending suitable questions. However, many existing approaches rely on fixed difficulty labels, static rating updates, or black-box prediction models that provide limited control over rating stability, interpretability, and time-constrained routing. This paper proposes MARS, a Momentum-Aware Adaptive Rating System for interpretable adaptive assessment. MARS represents the question bank as a directed weighted knowledge graph and updates learner proficiency using dynamic rating sensitivity, response quality, and momentum-aware learner velocity. We also formulate a time-budgeted mark-maximization objective in which the policy selects questions within a fixed test duration under negative marking. Experiments on ASSISTments 2009 and MARS-SimExam evaluate MARS for prediction, rating stability, and adaptive routing. Results show that MARS provides smoother rating updates than Fixed Elo and achieves the highest score under time-budgeted negative-marking routing, improving the total score by 8.09 over the strongest baseline and reducing overtime violations from 50% to 5.6%. These results suggest that MARS is suitable for real-time, interpretable, and deployment-friendly adaptive assessment.

Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.21685 [cs.CY]

(or arXiv:2610.21685v1 [cs.CY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.21685 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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