Calvin Isley

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a researcher at the Computational Policy Lab. My research interests lie in responsible AI and the evaluation of deployed AI systems, with a focus on education. Before beginning my Ph.D., I earned my bachelor's degree in Economics and Computer Science, along with a minor in mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis and worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve.

Research

From Constitutions to Control: Interpretable Rewards for Aligning Language Models

Johann D. Gaebler, Calvin Isley, Max Lamparth, Stephen Casper, and Sharad Goel

Working paper.

arXiv PDF

Receptiveness, Not Sycophancy: Distinguishing Engagement from Deference in Language Models

Calvin Isley, Johann D. Gaebler, Max Lamparth, Julia Minson, and Sharad Goel

Working paper.

arXiv PDF Code

AI-written admissions essays are widespread but penalized

Calvin Isley, Johann D. Gaebler, and Sharad Goel

Working paper.

arXiv PDF

Reassessing the Role of Standardized Tests in University Admissions

Johann D. Gaebler, Calvin Isley, Christopher Avery, and Sharad Goel

Working paper.

NBER Working Paper

Mitigating Label Bias with Interpretable Rubric Embeddings

Calvin Isley, Johann D. Gaebler, and Sharad Goel

To appear in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 39 (NeurIPS 2026).

arXiv PDF

Assessing the Quality of AI-Generated Exams: A Large-Scale Field Study

Calvin Isley, Joshua Gilbert, Evangelos Kassos, Michaela Kocher, Allen Nie, Emma Brunskill, Ben Domingue, Jake Hofman, Joscha Legewie, Teddy Svoronos, Charlotte Tuminelli, Sharad Goel

Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026). Oral Presentation.

AAAI PDF Slides Code arXiv

Money market fund repo and the ON RRP facility

Samuel J Hempel, Calvin Isley, R Jay Kahn, Patrick E McCabe

FEDS Notes, 2023

URL