Why a high kappa score still does not make an LLM judge trustworthy
IanArawjo · x · 2026-07-21
A follow-up explanation of the same metric issue: agreement statistics are more sensitive to random disagreements than to a consistent offset.
If an LLM is biased by a nearly constant amount — for example, always scoring one point above or below human raters — inter-rater alignment metrics may still look fine. That means a high kappa score does not necessarily mean the judge is truly reliable.
Takeaway
- Random noise hurts agreement scores more than stable bias.
- A judge can look “aligned” while still being systematically off in practice.
Related event: Study Warns: Unchecked LLM Judges Yield High False Positives(7 posts)→
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