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Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

studyarena.com

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Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#61

Post by pasharayan »

avaer wrote: post #19

> 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.

I think it's less about curricula and more about how professors should eval their students. In previous era's essays are a proxy of the students ability to reason, remember and argue certain points - but its clear they fall short now.

I suspect the best schools into the future will integrate lots of socratic defenses of theses, building real things in real time or solving problems with a professor in a case study manner. My last company was a good hint to the future.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#62

Post by pasharayan »

Honali wrote: post #32

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

Will give this a shot - we're going to try to work with students and schools better on normalizing this stuff out

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#65

Post by gherkinnn »

pmontra wrote: post #25
StableAlkyne wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 liter…

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.

The code is fine, yes. But now that I am dabbling in spec-driven development (unsure whether I like it) I have to read a lot of prose and I simply cannot get myself to read a page of claudisms. It is that painful.

The odd phrases are one thing, what numbs my brain is how everything is evenly bombastic and lacks any sense of rhythm. Technical documents should not read like catchphrases strung together.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#66

Post by pasharayan »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #47

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

Students do have different incentives in writing than SWE's. There's the habit of reaching word counts for assignments, some social signalling of how intellgent you are with essay length etc.

The data we have is just there to compare for the student base. I'd love to try it out on other cohorts - but the acquisition of such users and the product to make them happy is hard to achieve!

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#67

Post by pasharayan »

userbinator wrote: post #12

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.

You'll find some paragraphs are half written by Ai and some written totally by me. It's heavily edited from its original form (as it was a data report by codex on our db) - but some paragraphs which were good enough stayed.

E.g. Contrast my human written paragraph vs the AI written first paragraph

Human written:

"The three most popular AI models used by college students are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. As of August 2026 the data on StudyArena shows they prefer Gemini. "

vs

AI Written "Most AI comparsions are written like wine reviews. Claude is subtle. ChatGPT is dependable.."

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#68

Post by levelZero »

pasharayan wrote: post #59
levelZero wrote: post #57

Claude prose praising Gemini ;-)

Codex - at least initially haha! I wrote lots of insights and findings and pushed out a lot of false logic it picked up. Personally I hate claude writing cause it feels bureaucratic. But definitely wrote a ton more with my bare hands and brain.

My bad. If you are interested, it was "Gemini's lead matters..." which tingled.

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#69

Post by glimshe »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #10
gherkinnn wrote: post #3

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

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. 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 liter…

That claim about load bearing is doing a lot of work there!

I'm curious to know how "Claudish" emerged during the training process. Why each AI has a particular voice if much of the training material is the same across AIs?

Re: Analyzing student votes across AI models for college essay help

#70

Post by levelZero »

gherkinnn wrote: post #65
pmontra wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The code is fine, yes. But now that I am dabbling in spec-driven development (unsure whether I like it) I have to read a lot of prose and I simply cannot get myself to read a page of claudisms. It is that painful. The odd phrases are one thing, what numbs my brain is how everything is evenly bombastic and lacks any sense of rhythm. Technical documents should not read like catchphrases strung together.

don't just dabble, dive in! domain-expert, buck-stopping, orchestrating architects of intent under constraints are going to be the only survivors ;-)
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