LLMs (Large language models) have revolutionized NLP (Natural Language Processing), yet their pedagogical value for low-resource languages remains unclear. We present GRILE (Grammar Romanian Inference and Language Explanations) , the first open benchmark of 1,151 multiple-choice questions harvested from Romanian high-stakes exams (National Evaluation, Baccalaureate, university admissions). GRILE enables us to probe two complementary abilities of seven state-of-the-art multilingual and Romanian-specific LLMs: (i) selecting the correct answer, and (ii) producing linguistically accurate explanations. While Gemini 2.5 Pro reaches 83% accuracy, most open-weight models stay below 65%, and 48% of their explanations contain factual or pedagogical flaws according to expert review. A detailed error analysis pinpoints systematic weaknesses in morphology and in applying the latest DOOM3 orthographic norms. All data, code and a public web demo are released to catalyze future research. Our findings expose open challenges for trustworthy educational NLP in low-resource settings and establish GRILE as a new test-bed for controllable explanation generation and evaluation.
@article{arxiv.2508.14279,
title = {GRILE: A Benchmark for Grammar Reasoning and Explanation in Romanian LLMs},
author = {Adrian-Marius Dumitran and Alexandra-Mihaela Danila and Angela-Liliana Dumitran},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.14279},
year = {2025}
}