Automated Analysis of Learning Outcomes and Exam Questions Based on Bloom's Taxonomy (2511.10903v1)

Abstract: This paper explores the automatic classification of exam questions and learning outcomes according to Bloom's Taxonomy. A small dataset of 600 sentences labeled with six cognitive categories - Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation - was processed using traditional ML models (Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machines), recurrent neural network architectures (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU, BiGRU), transformer-based models (BERT and RoBERTa), and LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, Anthropic). Each model was evaluated under different preprocessing and augmentation strategies (for example, synonym replacement, word embeddings, etc.). Among traditional ML approaches, Support Vector Machines (SVM) with data augmentation achieved the best overall performance, reaching 94 percent accuracy, recall, and F1 scores with minimal overfitting. In contrast, the RNN models and BERT suffered from severe overfitting, while RoBERTa initially overcame it but began to show signs as training progressed. Finally, zero-shot evaluations of LLMs indicated that OpenAI and Gemini performed best among the tested LLMs, achieving approximately 0.72-0.73 accuracy and comparable F1 scores. These findings highlight the challenges of training complex deep models on limited data and underscore the value of careful data augmentation and simpler algorithms (such as augmented SVM) for Bloom's Taxonomy classification.