Harnessing LLMs for Reliable Academic Supervision: A Comparative Study

[Submitted on 16 Jul 2026 (v1), last revised 20 Jul 2026 (this version, v2)]

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Abstract:Large language models routinely produce fluent answers to single-shot prompts, yet deploying them as reliable components of a domain decision system is substantially harder. Closing this gap is the work of harness engineering: the deliberate composition of deterministic scaffolding (symbolic filters, retrieval, schema-typed I/O, LLM-as-judge loops, HITL gates, persistent state, audit trails) around an LLM core. We present a case study in academic supervision, a domain combining high-stakes recommendation, longitudinal accountability, and structured operational workflows.
We compare a baseline Academic Supervision Assistant (ASA), a GPT-5 chatbot with no scaffolding, against a multi-module system, Academic Supervision System (ASuS) that wraps the much smaller GPT-4o-mini in a LangGraph harness with symbolic semantic retrieval, schema-validated outputs, LLM-as-judge with bounded retry, HITL gates, deterministic weighted risk scoring with LLM narration, and a per-node SQLite audit trail. The evaluation rubric is retargeted at six harness-mechanism dimensions (grounding, explainability, consistency, process integrity, cognitive load, constraint adherence). A blind ten-rater hybrid evaluation, supplemented by a 2 x 2 model-harness ablation, finds that ASuS, despite using a much smaller base model, outscores ASA on every dimension. Across ten raters the pooled mean for ASuS is 4.08 versus 1.23 for ASA, and 8 of 10 raters reject the null at alpha = 0.05 on a paired Wilcoxon test; full numbers are in Sections 6.4 and 6.7. The ablation confirms that the structural contributions of the harness are largely model-invariant. We extract seven recurring harness-engineering patterns and argue that where reliability, traceability, and institutional consistency matter more than open-ended fluency, harness engineering challenges the prevailing ‘bigger model is better’ intuition.

Submission history

From: Akash Raj [view email]
[v1] Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:14:27 UTC (578 KB)
[v2] Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:40:07 UTC (687 KB)