Original title: Towards Scalable Measurement of Durable Skills
Amir Globerson, Amy Keeling, Anisha Choudhury, Anna Iurchenko +36 · September 2026
Durable skills like collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking matter for work, but schools often ignore them because they are hard to measure. Good tests need to feel like natural real-world human conversations, but they also must stay controlled and reproducible. Researchers used large language models, or LLMs, to solve this problem. In their setup, a person talks with AI teammates. These AI partners mimic real human group work. Behind the scenes, an "Executive LLM" guides the chat to coax out clear proof of the person's skills. A separate AI evaluator then grades the conversation transcripts. The team tested this setup across several durable skills and tested an autorater on complex tasks done by real students for creativity. They found that the Executive LLM significantly increases the evidence drawn out during the talk. Finally, the automated AI scores largely agreed with marks from expert human judges.
Imagine you are hiring for a team project. You ask candidates about their past teamwork, but they give vague answers. Then a skilled interviewer starts asking detailed follow-ups that force them to describe exactly how they resolved a conflict. In this paper, the AI teammates play the role of that interviewer while also participating as teammates, creating a realistic setting where the person's collaboration skills naturally show up.
Schools and employers know that skills like creativity and collaboration matter, but they rarely measure them because it is expensive and subjective. This work shows a way to assess them through a structured chat with AI, making it possible to track and teach these skills at scale. That could change how education and hiring evaluate what actually drives success.
The paper does not compare its framework to traditional assessments like human-led group tasks. The automated scoring is only fully validated for creativity, not for collaboration or critical thinking. The sample size of human participants and generalizability across different contexts are not discussed in the abstract.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Towards Scalable Measurement of Durable Skills — Amir Globerson, Amy Keeling, Anisha Choudhury et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.