BanglaMATH : A Bangla benchmark dataset for testing LLM mathematical reasoning at grades 6, 7, and 8

Large Language Models (LLMs) have tremendous potential to play a key role in supporting mathematical reasoning, with growing use in education and AI research. However, most existing benchmarks are limited to English, creating a significant gap for low-resource languages. For example, Bangla is spoken by nearly 250 million people who would collectively benefit from LLMs capable of native fluency. To address this, we present BanglaMATH, a dataset of 1.7k Bangla math word problems across topics such as Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Logical Reasoning, sourced from Bangla elementary school workbooks and annotated with details like grade level and number of reasoning steps. We have designed BanglaMATH to evaluate the mathematical capabilities of both commercial and open-source LLMs in Bangla, and we find that Gemini 2.5 Flash and DeepSeek V3 are the only models to achieve strong performance, with $\ge$ 80\% accuracy across three elementary school grades. Furthermore, we assess the robustness and language bias of these top-performing LLMs by augmenting the original problems with distracting information, and translating the problems into English. We show that both LLMs fail to maintain robustness and exhibit significant performance bias in Bangla. Our study underlines current limitations of LLMs in handling arithmetic and mathematical reasoning in low-resource languages, and highlights the need for further research on multilingual and equitable mathematical understanding. Dataset link: \href{https://github.com/TabiaTanzin/BanglaMATH-A-Bangla-benchmark-dataset-for-testing-LLM-mathematical-reasoning-at-grades-6-7-and-8.git}{https://github.com/BanglaMATH}