Before You Polish the Rubric: Give the Judge an Answer the Candidate Did Not Write
·7 mins
An LLM judge that reads the candidate answer first ends up checking how the answer looks. Give it an independent answer, a reference or its own written first, before it scores. In one study (Zhou, 2026) the same judge accepted 71.9% of wrong answers with the candidate in view and 1.2% when it wrote its own answer first.