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Students prefer Gemini over ChatGPT and Claude for AI essays in blind tests

https://studyarena.com/blog/chatgpt-vs-claude-vs-gemini-college-essays-2026
28•pasharayan•2h ago

Comments

ShawWang•2h ago
Gemini is bad at coding, but good at writing. More human like
madhatter999•35m ago
Makes sense when you consider what type of data Google had available in abundance. Natural written language (e.g., Docs, Gmail, Books) and natural spoken language (e.g., YouTube).

One could argue that Google Colab would supply the training data for better coding performance. I would argue that Colab is mostly used for non-complex (e.g., small number of variables) and self-contained (i.e., runnable in one page) code that can’t train a model for multi-folder and multi-page projects that rely on global connections, which real-life coding would often require.

danpalmer•24m ago
According to public material, Google does not train Gemini on Gmail or Docs: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/pr... https://proton.me/business/blog/google-docs-ai-scraping
smlacy•19m ago
Yet
WithinReason•6m ago
[delayed]
madhatter999•6m ago
Given it's Google, I don't believe it.
gherkinnn•1h ago
Anything is better than the current crop of Claudes, its prose has become painful.
purplecats•39m ago
You make some good points, but the best one is the one you might not be aware you've made.
StableAlkyne•32m ago
For real, the "Claudish" has become so painful to read that it just takes me out of whatever task I was working on.

When prompted to use simple English without jargon, it's still filled with load bearing honest caveats in every footgun seam it talks about — what I should have led with. <Insert whatever other Claude cliche you prefer>

And I'm not the only one to notice this. Next time it's up for renewal, my team is abandoning it for GH Copilot in order to use literally any other frontier model.

kuboble•26m ago
Say a word.
pmontra•12m ago
Yes, Claude speaks Claudish but at the end of the day I care about the Ruby, Python, JS it writes. It still does a good job at it even if maybe I prefer the way DeepSeek talks. I did not use other models in an agentic harness.
asdfologist•13m ago
Fair challenge, the ability to write good prose is load-bearing for essential tasks.
hesprs•58m ago
True. Whenever I ask LLMs to translate English to other languages, Gemini is always the most natural one.
acosmism•41m ago
ok. so what
mial•37m ago
From my own tests, the best model for writing complex, nuanced prose is Opus 4.6. All the next versions are impossible to coax into good writing. Gemini is OK, GPT ok but requires significant prompt tuning.
John7878781•34m ago
In my experience, Gemini excels at explaining new concepts clearly and intuitively. Much more so than other models.
zorked•13m ago
Gemini is the best general-purpose model. We hear a lot about the other ones here because we are focusing on coding.
inbx0•12m ago
So, given that developers these days mix and match models anyway with harnesses like Pi, has anyone tried letting Claude or GPT do the coding, and Gemini do the comments and documentation? Maybe even asking it to "translate" Claude's output messages to better human language for the developer or subagents?
pkulak•10m ago
Seems reasonable. You could just switch the model after the code is written, when you need to ask questions. You’ll lose your token cache, but that’s it.
foolfoolz•30m ago
when i use gemini i ask it to stop asking me questions, to stop showing me media and just use text, and be concise in output. with these directions it’s pretty useful
explodes•26m ago
My settings are similar. I also added to be very concise without losing important information. It's output is so slim now that I can ask yes or no questions. Asking for a code snippet gives me just a snippet without an accompanying paragraph of explanation that I would just ignore anyway. Of course I can still ask follow up questions, but it gets right to the point. No filler is a dream.
userbinator•30m ago
Having coworkers who use it and thus unfortunately needing to read its output, Claude's "English" is very obviously unnatural-sounding, and extremely distinctive in a bad and irritating way. It's almost like another dialect.

...and of course this article itself has a bit of AI-ish tone to it.

s18m•29m ago
its starting to feel that way with newer models. right after opus 4.6, I have started to notice the same
s18m•27m ago
I have the same workflow for about 3 months now (constant). same workflow since opus 4.5 and now with fable (variable). start with a plan about a problem (somewhat similar), write down the plan, use the plan to execute the work. Lately the plans are so verbose and confusing, Im starting to think of skipping the plan stage entirely or tell it to be super concise.
avaer•19m ago
> How to use Gemini for a college essay

Given that this is increasingly the go-to for a college degree, college needs to rethink its cirricula and place in the world. Or at least get rid of the essay.

Lest it become a place where student and teacher ais go to play pay-to-win social deduction video games.

demibabs•18m ago
Author, that doesn’t mean you need to get Gemini to write your article.
gexla•12m ago
GPT gets the most out there, but creates interesting nuance that turn an idea into a more creative exercise. Claude is like a more grounded GPT but may miss the nuance. Gemini is my last pick, but does better than the rest for making something clear and understandable. It gets to be exhausting parsing through Claude outputs and breaking it down into something more easily understandable. One way I use to improve this is to ask the LLM to pull upstream ideas from prior work on the topics. This makes me feel better about the possibility of hallucination, gives me alternate places to look, but the model still may pull things out of context or fall over on the interpretation.

Given all that, I can definitely see how Gemini would be preferred. And good for Google, because I would rather my offering be the top choice for the most people rather than better serving a small subset of users.

arcticfox2029•11m ago
I think that recently gemini has responded quickly but has not been effective, unable to support gpt.
mogili•9m ago
I've found Gemini to be better at writing. Claude has gotten worse while it gets better at coding / agentic use cases.
rienbdj•9m ago
Students? The couldn’t even write the essay!
Honali•7m ago
I'd love to see the same experiment with responses normalized for length, and with actual essay quality scored separately from how helpful the model's feedback felt
senderista•8m ago
It's so bad that my workflow has Sol rewrite all comments and error messages produced by Claude.

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