PEOAT: Personalization-Guided Evolutionary Question Assembly for One-Shot Adaptive Testing

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of intelligent education, Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) has attracted increasing attention by integrating educational psychology with deep learning technologies. Unlike traditional paper-and-pencil testing, CAT aims to efficiently and accurately assess ex- aminee abilities by adaptively selecting the most suitable items during the assessment process. However, its real-time and sequential nature presents limitations in practical scenarios, particularly in large-scale assessments where interaction costs are high, or in sensitive domains such as psychological evaluations where minimizing noise and interfer- ence is essential. These challenges constrain the applicability of conventional CAT methods in time-sensitive or resource- constrained environments. To this end, we first introduce a novel task called one-shot adaptive testing (OAT), which aims to select a fixed set of optimal items for each test-taker in a one-time selection. Meanwhile, we propose PEOAT, a Personalization-guided Evolutionary question assembly framework for One-hot Adaptive Testing from the perspec- tive of combinatorial optimization. Specifically, we began by designing a personalization-aware initialization strategy that integrates differences between examinee ability and ex- ercise difficulty, using multi-strategy sampling to construct a diverse and informative initial population. Building on this, we proposed a cognitive-enhanced evolutionary framework incorporating schema-preserving crossover and cognitively guided mutation to enable efficient exploration through infor- mative signals. To maintain diversity without compromising fitness, we further introduced a diversity-aware environmen- tal selection mechanism. The effectiveness of PEOAT is val- idated through extensive experiments on two datasets, com- plemented by case studies that uncovered valuable insights.