The spread isn't as large as I thought from the headline. It's closer to a toss-up than I would have expected.

The length of the response is a huge factor:

> Students tended to prefer longer responses. The selected answer was 37% longer on average than the alternatives. The longest response won 47.7% of decisive writing comparisons. The shortest still won 25.0%.

So the score is partially a proxy for longest responses.

Makes me wonder how much the reviewers actually read the text. Were lazy evaluators picking the text that looked the longest or most structured without reading it all?

> 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.

Author, that doesn’t mean you need to get Gemini to write your article.

In my experience, Gemini excels at explaining new concepts clearly and intuitively. Much more so than other models.

Anything is better than the current crop of Claudes, its prose has become painful.

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.

Gemini is bad at coding, but good at writing. More human like

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

IT students should use their own LLM.

skeptical

at most, the result could be useful for fellow students

I have no doubt other cohorts would rate differently

it is known (on HN at least) e.g. that SWEs tend to prefer brevity, contrary to these students apparently

I've found Gemini to be better at writing. Claude has gotten worse while it gets better at coding / agentic use cases.

If you use Gemini after reading Claude's simlish, it will feel very refreshing.

True. Whenever I ask LLMs to translate English to other languages, Gemini is always the most natural one.

Students? The couldn’t even write the essay!

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

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.

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.

I use Fable for writing code and some planning. I use GPT for planning/roadmaps and code review, it checks Fable. I use Gemini for stray conversations. Gemini has a better conversational style than GPT, less robotic; it hallucinates more unfortunately, it has plainly fallen quite a bit behind, but it's still highly useful to converse with, research with, etc. And it spares me wasting usage of GPT or Fable. I use Gemini for the 'everything else' category, basically. Gemini never goes anywhere near anything serious.

Fable & Claude Opus 4.x or 5 are terrible to talk to about anything. I gave up on that entirely and just use Anthropic's models for work.

Any less serious technical work I'll use GPT for, as the usage limits are quite fantastic.

Did they assess if any wanted to use their own brain?

I'm blown away, lol. I am not a fan of Gemini.

ok. so what

I think that recently gemini has responded quickly but has not been effective, unable to support gpt.