Rethinking LLM-Judged Helpfulness as a Pedagogy Signal: A Pre-Registered Audit Across Tutor Models
LLM tutoring poses a measurement problem: can a general-purpose helpfulness rubric distinguish direct answer-giving from pedagogical guidance? We audit this signal in a pre-registered study. Within each of three tutor bases, we compare conversational and pedagogical policies instantiated with the same underlying model and paired with one fixed weak simulated student. Deterministic detectors mea…