Whose Facts Count? A Culturally Responsive Audit of LLM Evaluation Benchmarks

Abstract

LLM benchmarks function as evaluation instruments, informing decisions that affect education, labor, and public services worldwide. Drawing on Hood, Kirkhart, and Hopson's culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) frameworks, this paper applies a six-dimension CR rubric to audit OpenAI's SimpleQA (N = 4,326 items) and the LMSYS Chatbot Arena (N = 600 conversations). Every SimpleQA question requires English-language archival verification as its evidentiary basis. A single rater's preoccupation with Colombian founding dates accounts for 2.70% of items, inflating the appearance of Global South coverage. English-language prompts constitute 76.3% of Arena conversations, against an International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-estimated 25.9% share of global internet users. A 50-item counter-benchmark scored a mean CR deficit nearly three times lower than SimpleQA (Cohen's d = 1.01). The paper proposes a practical CR evaluation framework. These are structural validity failures, not incidental measurement problems, with direct consequences for communities whose knowledge traditions these instruments were not built to see.