RoCulturaMCQ: Building a Benchmark While Learning Statistics
The broad adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased the need for human-curated datasets that serve as evaluation benchmarks. This need is particularly pronounced for non-English languages and for tasks that are inherently subjective and require multiple human perspectives. One such example is the development of benchmarks designed to assess the cultural awareness of LLMs. Statistics and data science courses offer a potential setting for developing such benchmarks while teaching students to apply LLM evaluation techniques using statistical inference. This paper presents a pilot project in which students in a statistics course within a data science engineering program created culturally diverse multiple-choice questions, generated answers using LLMs, and applied statistical methods to assess model accuracy. Student feedback indicated the project was engaging and useful for learning, while also highlighting a notable reliance on LLMs, particularly for interpreting statistical results. The resulting dataset comprises 1355 multiple-choice questions across 18 categories, including language, social media, and politics. After filtering valid items, the dataset was used to evaluate both closed- and open-source LLMs. Results show that the Gemini (closed-source) and Qwen (open-source) model families achieved the best performance, with improvements linked to model size, reasoning capabilities, and access to search tools. The best closed-source model achieved an accuracy of 97.66%, whereas the best open-source model achieved an accuracy of 79.07%. Qualitative analyses of errors in the filtering procedure and model reasoning process point to possible explanations into the challenges LLMs face when handling culturally specific content. Furthermore, results support a cultural injection hypothesis, whereby cultural knowledge is embedded during pretraining and accessed through instruction tuning. Through this work, we aim to demonstrate how statistics and data science courses can provide productive contexts for developing open-source benchmarks for non-English languages while also enriching students’ learning experiences. The dataset is publicly available.