Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring

Microsoft Research introduces StudentSim, a research system that trains personalized AI student simulators from publicly available, de-identified learner records to evaluate and improve AI tutors before testing with real learners. The work also presents StudentSimEval, a benchmark spanning chess, second-language English writing, and mathematics that measures behavioral fidelity and guidance responsiveness, with StudentSim outperforming baselines such as GPT-5.4 and Maia2. In a chess tutor reinforcement learning study, a tutor trained with StudentSim feedback reached 90.5% accuracy versus 75.7% for the no-RL baseline and 71.6% for the GPT-5.4 reward condition, as rated by blind human chess experts.