Teaching primarily helps the student agent realize existing potential rather than raise its absolute performance ceiling¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Improvements at higher Pass@N sampling budgets are comparatively small, indicating teaching narrows the Pass@1-to-Pass@N gap rather than increasing the ceiling. → Zheng Li 2026

Evidence¶

Zheng Li 2026¶

Zheng Li, Siyao Song, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Ying Zeng, Minghao Li, Zhifang Sui. (2026). TeachBench: A Syllabus-Grounded Framework for Evaluating Teaching Ability in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21375 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2601.21375

q2 · i? · design · r2

Analysis of Pass@4, Pass@16, and Pass@64 results on the Gaokao Mathematics subset (Table 2). The authors interpret that "teaching primarily helps students unlock existing po- tential rather than increasing their absolute perfor- mance ceiling"; no effect sizes are printed.

"As shown in Table 2, improvements at higher Pass@N values are comparatively small. This is expected, as the student agent already approaches near-saturation performance under large sampling budgets, leaving limited room for further gains through teaching."

Discussion¶

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