# Pass or Fail? Evaluating LLMs on Two Greek Examination Benchmarks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34800 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34800/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16884/) (2023)
- [Plutus: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Low-Resource Greek Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18772/) (2025)
- [GreekBarBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Free-Text Legal Reasoning and Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17267/) (2025)
- [Krikri: Advancing Open Large Language Models for Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13772/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Reproducibility Crisis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00651/) (2025)
- [A New Dataset for End-to-End Sign Language Translation: The Greek Elementary School Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04753/) (2023)
- [GreekMMLU: A Native-Sourced Multitask Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models in Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05150/) (2026)
- [The Greek podcast corpus: Competitive speech models for low-resourced languages with weakly supervised data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15284/) (2024)
- [GRDD: A Dataset for Greek Dialectal NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00802/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Monolingual and Multilingual Large Language Models for Greek Question Answering: The DemosQA Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16811/) (2026)
- [Ancient Greek to Modern Greek Machine Translation: A Novel Benchmark and Fine-Tuning Experiments on LLMs and NMT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18504/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) imposes a thorough evaluation of their linguistic and analytical capabilities as well as constraints, particularly for a language with limited benchmark coverage such as Greek. To address the limited availability of comprehensive benchmarks in this domain, we introduce Prot-Ex and Pan-Ex, two benchmarks consisting of questions from entrance exams for Greek Model and Experimental schools as well as the Panhellenic exams (the Greek national university entrance examinations). These benchmarks are employed to assess the performance of text-only LLMs-including the Greek-adapted KriKri-8B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-4-26B, and Qwen-3-32B-across diverse academic disciplines (Modern Greek, Mathematics, Physics, etc.) and task formats (closed, structured, and open-ended), including textualized visual context (i.e., image descriptions). Our findings indicate the localized KriKri-8B significantly outperforms its base model, successfully rivalling much larger LLMs in linguistically demanding humanities tasks. By leveraging an LLM-as-a-Judge methodology, we expose the inadequacy of traditional lexical metrics for evaluating complex reasoning. Crucially, we uncover a few-shot prompting paradox: while synthetic examples improve accuracy in closed-ended questions, they severely overload the context window of 8B models in structured tasks, causing significant performance degradation. Ultimately, this study suggests targeted linguistic adaptation offsets lower parameter counts in specialized domains, despite the fragility of smaller models to prompt verbosity.