Reducing Barriers to Academic Support: Evaluating a Course-Specific RAG System for Addressing Help-Seeking Disparities in Higher Education
Access to academic support is a key determinant of student success, yet students experience it unequally: some readily seek help from lecturers or tutors, while others hesitate due to anxiety, fear of judgement, uncertainty about expectations, or low confidence in their understanding. This may be especially evident in computing education, where programming tasks are cumulative and cognitively demanding. Although students increasingly turn to general-purpose generative AI tools, these can produce responses that are inaccurate, insufficiently contextualised, or misaligned with module expectations. This study presents and evaluates Beacon, a course-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RA...
| Authors | Andy Gray, Jake Hobbs |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 September 2026 |
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