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CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education

Paper · 2026 · Nishat Raihan, Noah Erdachew, Jayoti Devi et al.

Summary

LLM coding assistants are spreading in Computer Science classrooms. They can be pushed into producing material that undermines learning, such as complete graded solutions, or into writing dangerous software like ransomware or data-wiping scripts. The authors find that general-purpose filters such as LLaMA Guard and NeMo Guard do not account for these classroom-specific risks.

They propose CodeGuard, a framework with three parts:

  • A taxonomy that sorts prompts into Irrelevant (IR), Relevant–Safe (RS) and Relevant–Unsafe (RU). The unsafe class is split into 20 subtypes, built with two experienced CS instructors and grounded in the integrity policies of real course syllabi.
  • A dataset of 8,000 prompts aligned with the taxonomy.
  • PromptShield, a compact fine-tuned sentence encoder that flags problematic prompts in real time.

Benchmarking shows clear gaps in existing LLM guardrails. PromptShield outperforms them with an F1 of 0.93. Applying CodeGuard cuts harmful or policy-breaking code completions by 30–65% while leaving legitimate educational help intact.

The work matters because it gives instructors and tutoring-system developers an openly released, domain-tailored safety layer. The authors plan a classroom user study pending IRB approval.

Key points

  • Three-way taxonomy: IR, RS and RU, with explicit labelling conditions. The 20 RU subcategories include graded-solution requests, autograder submission code, ransomware creation, privilege escalation and supply-chain injection.
  • How the taxonomy was built: three Delphi-style rounds with two CS instructors, plus analysis of integrity clauses in 18 undergraduate CS syllabi from 12 universities across North America, Europe and Asia.
  • Irrelevant prompts: 3,000 were drawn, 1,000 each, from Alpaca-Instruct, LaMini-Instruct and Infinity-Instruct. A regex filter removed any programming-related items from this set.
  • Main results: PromptShield reaches 0.93 F1, beating existing guardrail methods. CodeGuard reduces unsafe code completions by 30–65% without hurting legitimate tasks.
  • Release: the dataset (Do-Not-Code), the PromptShield model and the evaluation scripts are public at github.com/mraihan-gmu/CodeGuard.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 worksComputer Science Applications · 102 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,320 works

Cite

Cite as Nishat Raihan, Noah Erdachew, Jayoti Devi, Joanna C. S. Santos and Marcos Zampieri. 2026. CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.48

@inproceedings{raihan2026codeguard,
  title = {{CodeGuard: Improving LLM Guardrails in CS Education}},
  author = {Nishat Raihan, Noah Erdachew, Jayoti Devi, Joanna C. S. Santos and Marcos Zampieri},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.48},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.48}
}

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