Curriculum Brain: Constructing Curriculum Knowledge Graphs as a Substrate for Cognitive Diagnosis

Shrideep Tamboli, Chiranjeevi Maddala, Eshal Minhaj

Cognitive Diagnostic Models (CDMs) identify which specific skills a student has and has not mastered, the signal a personalized learning path needs and a single aggregate score cannot give. Yet they are rarely deployed. The obstacle is their precondition: the Q-matrix, a mapping from every assessment item to the skills it requires, historically authored by hand. We separate the task into two stages: first construct the curriculum's own knowledge graph, the full space of concepts and skills it contains, independent of any item; then map items against that graph on demand. This paper addresses the first stage only. The item-mapping stage is designed but not implemented here, so the claim that this shifts judgment cost from once per item to once per curriculum is a design rationale rather than a finding. We present Curriculum Brain, a two-repository system pairing a version-controlled knowledge base with an agentic pipeline of eleven single-responsibility agents under a thin deterministic orchestrator. It generates candidate concept-skill mappings from official curriculum documents, checks them against accumulated rules, and compares them with a concept-skill map extracted…