The Short Answer: Copilot or ChatGPT for Studying?
ChatGPT is better than Copilot for most students studying on their own. If your school gives you a Microsoft 365 account, start with Copilot's Study and Learn agent instead. ChatGPT's free plan bundles a tutoring mode, in-chat quizzes, and saved flashcard decks, and more of your classmates use it. In a Pew Research Center survey of US teens in fall 2025, 59% said they use ChatGPT, against 14% for Copilot. Copilot pulls ahead in one setup. Signed in with a school account, it turns your own slides and PDFs into practice activities at no cost.
On a personal Microsoft account, Copilot is a capable free chatbot, but its study features don't match ChatGPT's yet. Whichever you choose, the research below finds that how you use it matters more than which one you open. If you're also weighing other assistants, see our guides to Claude vs ChatGPT for studying and Gemini vs ChatGPT for studying.
| If you are... | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A student with a school Microsoft 365 account (A1, A3, or A5) | Copilot's Study and Learn agent | Free practice activities built from your own files, with enterprise data protection |
| Studying on a personal account | ChatGPT | Study Mode, quizzes, and flashcards all work on the Free plan |
| A high school student aged 13 to 17 | School Copilot if IT has turned it on; otherwise ChatGPT | K-12 Copilot Chat is off until IT enables it; ChatGPT needs a parent's permission under 18 |
| Writing papers in Word | Either | Copilot is in Word on Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium, and Pro; ChatGPT's Word add-in works on Free, with limits |
| Careful about privacy | School Copilot, or ChatGPT with training off | School Copilot Chat doesn't train foundation models on your prompts; ChatGPT lets you opt out |
Which Copilot Do You Have? School vs Personal Accounts
"Copilot" is now one app with two very different products inside it, and which one you get depends on the account you sign in with.
Starting August 18, 2026, Microsoft began moving accounts to a single updated Copilot app that merges its consumer Copilot app with the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, rolling the change out gradually. You can sign in with a personal account, a work or school account, or both, and Microsoft's support page says "Chats, content, and data remain separate between account types in the app." Microsoft has also renamed the school and work product. In its words, "Microsoft 365 Copilot is now named Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now named Microsoft Copilot Chat." So a classmate who says Copilot is great for studying might be describing a tool you don't have.
| Personal Microsoft account | School account (Microsoft 365 A1, A3, or A5) | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | The free Copilot chatbot; paid Microsoft 365 plans add higher limits | Copilot Chat, included with your school's license at no extra cost |
| Tutoring | "Study and learn" chat mode that explains and can quiz you | The Study and Learn agent, with flashcards, quizzes, matching, and fill-in-the-blank |
| Built from your files | Uploads up to 50 MB per file, 20 per conversation | Study and Learn works from your .docx, .pptx, and .pdf files, URLs, and Copilot Pages |
| Minimum age | 13, older in some countries | 13; K-12 students only once IT enables it |
If you have a school account, look for a green shield in Copilot Chat. It means enterprise data protection is on, Microsoft's term for the contractual privacy commitments covered in the privacy section below. Students under 13 can't use school Copilot Chat at all.
Schools can also buy a full Microsoft Copilot license, at an academic price of $18 per user per month for students 13 and older. It adds priority access to the full Copilot experience in Word, PowerPoint, and the other Microsoft 365 apps, answers grounded in your school email and files, and, depending on license and region, a choice of models. The institution buys it, not you, so most students will be on the free school tier described above.
Copilot and ChatGPT Models in 2026
This is where both stood in mid-October 2026, after several model changes this year.
ChatGPT. On October 7, OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 in ChatGPT's Chat tab, with GPT-6 Sol for Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise, and GPT-6 Luna for Free and Go, whose rollout began the next day. Plus and higher plans had already had GPT-6 models in ChatGPT Work since September 22.
Copilot, personal account. Microsoft's help page lists five conversation modes: Quick response, Think Deeper, Smart, Search, and Study and learn. Think Deeper "is powered by the latest reasoning models from OpenAI," Smart uses GPT-5, and Search answers from the web with citations. Free use is "subject to available capacity and limits," and Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium, and Pro subscribers get higher limits and priority access.
Copilot, school account. Copilot Chat defaults to an Auto mode that routes each request between models, with standard access to GPT-5. Licensed Microsoft Copilot gets more choice. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 became its preferred model in July 2026, and on September 22 Microsoft began rolling out Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol, with availability varying by license and region.
Under the hood, the two overlap. Copilot has leaned on OpenAI's GPT models since it launched as Bing Chat in 2023, alongside Microsoft's own models for some features, so a "which one is smarter" test mostly measures settings and limits, and the next model release makes it stale anyway.
What the Research Says About Learning With Each
Two randomized trials, one with Copilot and one with a ChatGPT-style assistant, point the same way. How the AI was set up decided the results, not whose logo was on it.
The Copilot trial. In June and July 2024, a World Bank team ran a six-week after-school program in nine public schools in Benin City, Nigeria. Students worked in pairs with the free Microsoft Copilot, then powered by GPT-4, for up to two 90-minute sessions a week. Teachers were trained for three days, opened each session with a prompt they supplied, and walked the room to keep students on task, though they didn't provide direct instruction.
The results, published by MartÃn De Simone and colleagues as a World Bank working paper in May 2025, were large. Total test scores rose by 0.31 standard deviations, English by about 0.24, and scores on the school's regular end-of-term English exam by about 0.21. The authors put the English gain at roughly 1.5 years of typical schooling. There are two caveats. It's a working paper rather than a peer-reviewed journal article, and the control group got no extra lessons at all, so the design can't separate the chatbot from the added study time, though the authors argue extra time alone is unlikely to explain the gains.
The ChatGPT-style trial. Hamsa Bastani and colleagues ran a preregistered experiment with nearly 1,000 Turkish high school students, published in PNAS in June 2025. One group practiced math with "GPT Base," a GPT-4 interface designed to mimic ChatGPT. Their practice scores rose 48%, but when the AI was taken away for the exam, they scored 17% worse than classmates who never had it. A second version, "GPT Tutor," was told to give hints rather than answers and was fed teacher-written solutions. It lifted practice scores 127% and did no harm on the exam, though it didn't help either. GPT Base also gave a correct answer only 51% of the time. For more on these and other tutoring trials, see our review of whether AI tutors work.
OpenAI's Study Mode trial. In March 2026, OpenAI published its own randomized study of more than 300 college students. Students given access to Study Mode scored an adjusted 63.7% on a microeconomics exam, with both Study Mode variants pooled, against 55.0% for a control group that used Google Search and YouTube with AI overviews turned off. In neuroscience, the gap (61.7% vs 56.7%) wasn't distinguishable from chance. It's a company-run study with analysis "still underway," and it didn't compare Study Mode with ordinary ChatGPT.
Copilot's Study and Learn. We couldn't find a controlled study of Copilot's agent. Microsoft describes its design as "intended to be tested and refined as product data and efficacy research develop."
Accuracy, head to head. Researchers have pitted the two against each other on exams for years, and neither wins consistently:
| Study | Test | ChatGPT | Copilot or Bing Chat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rossettini et al., BMC Medical Education, 2024 | 820 Italian healthcare-degree entrance questions, September 2023 | About 93% (ChatGPT-4) | About 90%; not a significant gap |
| Morreel et al., PLOS Digital Health, 2024 | Antwerp medical licensing exam, 95 questions | 67% (ChatGPT's GPT-3.5, via the Poe app); GPT-4, also via Poe, scored 76% | 76% (Bing Chat) |
| Rakauskas et al., Journal of Hand Surgery Global Online, 2024 | 1,000 hand-surgery self-assessment questions | 63.4% (ChatGPT-4) | 59.9%, a significant gap |
| Khosravi et al., Scientific Reports, 2026 | Neurology questions, mostly in Persian, December 2025 | 86% (ChatGPT-5) | 88% |
All four tested older versions of both products, and no assistant came out ahead every time. That's what you'd expect from two tools that lean on the same model family.
Microsoft's own researchers co-wrote a related warning. Hao-Ping Lee and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research surveyed 319 knowledge workers for CHI 2025 and found that "higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking." It's a correlational survey of workers rather than a trial with students.
Copilot vs ChatGPT on 8 Common Study Tasks
Each verdict below comes from what Microsoft and OpenAI document as of October 2026, not from a lab test, so try both on your own coursework.
| Study task | Copilot | ChatGPT | Better pick |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Meeting a new concept | Study and learn mode guides you; the school agent coaches step by step | Study Mode asks guiding questions and checks understanding | Tie |
| 2. Turning slides and PDFs into practice | The school agent turns your files into practice, with citations | Upload notes and ask for a quiz or deck (Free: 3 uploads a day) | Copilot on a school account; ChatGPT otherwise |
| 3. A quick quiz on what you just read | Ask for a quiz in either mode; the school agent scores it | Interactive quizzes on every consumer plan and Edu | Tie on school accounts; ChatGPT on personal ones |
| 4. Flashcards you can come back to | School agent and Copilot Notebooks; none documented on personal accounts | Decks saved to a library, on every plan | ChatGPT on personal accounts |
| 5. Working through a problem set | Study and learn mode; Think Deeper for hard problems | Study Mode hints, plus visuals for 70+ math and science topics | ChatGPT |
| 6. Drafting and revising an essay | In Word on Personal, Family, Premium, and Pro; the school agent coaches without writing for you | Word add-in on every plan, limited on Free | Whichever your course policy allows |
| 7. Research for a paper | Search with citations; consumer Deep Research began retiring in August 2026 | Web search on every plan; limited deep research on Free | ChatGPT on free plans |
| 8. A recorded lecture | No audio formats in Microsoft's upload list; bring a transcript | Audio uploads on paid plans; Record mode on macOS for Plus and up | ChatGPT on paid plans |
Copilot's one clear win in the table depends on the school agent and your own course files. ChatGPT's come from breadth, since nearly all its study tools reach the free plan. If your lectures live on YouTube, the most reliable input for either assistant is the transcript. Pull it with YouTube Summary and paste the text into whichever one you use.
Copilot's Study Tools: Study and Learn and Notebooks
The Study and Learn agent (school accounts). Microsoft previewed it in November 2025 and made it generally available to all education customers in May 2026, at no additional cost. It's pre-installed for users 13 and older with a Microsoft 365 Education license (A1, A3, or A5) and lives in the Copilot app's left-hand navigation.
Instead of a wall of explanation, it builds flashcards, scored quizzes with an explanation for every answer, matching exercises, and fill-in-the-blank activities. You can ground it in your own Word documents, slides, PDFs, and web links, and it includes citations so you can trace information back to your materials. Microsoft's support page puts the design goal plainly: "the learner does the thinking, and the agent coaches them through the process."
Your school controls how prominent it is. In K-12 schools, Study and Learn is pre-selected by default, so every new chat starts there. In higher education the agent sits in the left navigation but isn't pre-selected unless an admin turns that on. Microsoft's support page says it works in 40 languages beyond US English, but not on mobile yet; mobile support is planned.
Copilot Notebooks. Also free on school accounts, Notebooks can build mind maps and a study guide with summary and topic pages, flashcards, quizzes, fill-in-the-blank activities, and matching. The flashcard, fill-in-the-blank, and matching pages only work from files under 100,000 characters, so split long readings.
On a personal account. You get the "Study and learn" mode, which Microsoft's help page says is "available to all Copilot users" and describes as "Optimized to explain concepts and guide you to an answer, rather than just providing direct answers." You can ask it to quiz you, and Learn Live, Microsoft's voice tutor, is still running. Microsoft doesn't document flashcard decks, matching, or saved activities for personal accounts.
Where Copilot is weaker. Its best study tools sit behind a school login that many students don't have, or that their school hasn't switched on. Consumer Copilot also lost features this year. Deep Research, Podcasts, and Group Chat began retiring on August 18, 2026, as accounts moved to the updated app.
ChatGPT's Study Tools: Study Mode, Quizzes, and Flashcards
Study Mode. OpenAI launched it on July 29, 2025, and it's now on every plan, Free included. It answers with guiding questions and comprehension checks instead of a finished solution. It doesn't run inside Projects or custom GPTs, though, so start tutoring sessions in a normal chat and upload your notes there.
Interactive quizzes. Since August 14, 2026, you can ask ChatGPT to quiz you and answer inside the conversation, on every consumer plan and on Edu. It's most useful straight after an explanation, which is when you're likeliest to overrate what you understood.
Flashcards. Added on September 22, 2026, for all plans on web and mobile. Ask for a deck on a topic or from your uploaded notes, flip each card, and mark it known or one to practice again. Decks are saved to a library, so you can review them again days later.
Visuals for math and science. Since March 2026, ChatGPT can draw interactive explanations for more than 70 math and science topics, for every logged-in user.
For teenagers. Users who say they're 13 to 17, or whom OpenAI's system estimates are under 18, are placed in ChatGPT for Teens. It includes Study Mode and "responsible homework reminders" that notice attempts to shortcut an assignment and point toward Study Mode. Parents with linked accounts can make Study Mode the default, though they can't read their teen's chats.
Where ChatGPT is weaker. The Free plan allows only three uploads a day, which runs out fast if you study from several files. The bigger risk is the one from the PNAS trial. Ordinary answer-everything chat is one message away, and Study Mode only helps while you stay in it.
Privacy, Ads, and Age Limits for Students
| ChatGPT (Free, Go, Plus) | Copilot, personal account | Copilot Chat, school account | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Used to train models? | May be, unless you turn off "Improve the model for everyone" | Updated app: "aren't used to train foundation models"; the older app may, unless you opt out | Not used to train foundation models |
| Review and retention | Temporary Chats skip training and are deleted after 30 days | "Humans may review your conversations" | Logged; your school's IT admins can search and audit them |
| Minimum age | 13 (or your country's minimum), with a parent's permission under 18 | 13, older in some countries | 13; K-12 students only once IT enables it |
| Under-18 protections | ChatGPT for Teens, with optional parental controls | No personalization from chat history, no personalized ads | Set by your school's IT admins |
Both consumer products can show ads. ChatGPT may show them on Free and Go, but not to accounts it identifies as under 18. Personal Copilot may show them if you don't pay for Microsoft 365, though not personalized ones to under-18s.
"Not used for training" isn't the same as "private." On a school account, your institution can see what you asked, so think twice before pasting in anything personal. ChatGPT's opt-out also has a gap. OpenAI says that if you give feedback on a response, "the entire conversation associated with that feedback may be used to train our models," even with training switched off.
Is Copilot or ChatGPT Free for Students? Plans and Prices
Both are free to start, and nearly every study feature above has a free version. The main exceptions are ChatGPT's audio uploads and Record mode, and Copilot inside Word, so price mostly matters if you want higher limits. US prices as of October 2026:
| Plan | ChatGPT | Microsoft Copilot |
|---|---|---|
| Free | GPT-6 Luna, unlimited text chat, 3 uploads a day, ads possible | Chat, images, and uploads "subject to available capacity and limits"; ads possible |
| Low-cost tier | Go, $8/month, ads possible | Microsoft 365 Personal, $9.99/month, higher Copilot limits plus Word, Excel, and PowerPoint |
| Standard | Plus, $20/month, GPT-6 Sol, more uploads and memory | Microsoft 365 Premium, $19.99/month, adds Researcher and Analyst |
| Through your school | ChatGPT Edu, bought by the institution | Copilot Chat, Study and Learn, and Notebooks free with A1, A3, or A5 |
| Student offer, fall 2026 | Four free months of Plus for US college students, claim by October 31, 2026 | The 2026 free-Premium promotions for students have ended |
A few details before you sign up for anything:
- OpenAI's student offer needs a payment method and renews automatically at $20 a month. Eligibility is verified through SheerID, it covers students at US institutions only, and subscriptions billed through the App Store or Google Play don't qualify.
- Copilot Pro is gone. Microsoft stopped selling it, and support for existing subscribers ended on August 1, 2026, so older guides that recommend it are out of date.
- Check what your school already pays for. If your school runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot Chat and Study and Learn may already be waiting behind your school login. If it has ChatGPT Edu, that's yours too, and Edu chats aren't used for training by default.
How to Study With Copilot or ChatGPT So It Sticks
Neither assistant will bring up Tuesday's explanation on Friday unless you do. Build that into how you use it:
- Capture as you read. Mark the lines you'll need in articles and PDFs with Glasp's web highlighter, and add your Kindle highlights to the same library. Keep it to a few lines per page; they're raw material for the steps below.
- Give the AI your material, not the open web. Copilot's school agent can work straight from your slides and PDFs. In ChatGPT, upload your notes in a regular chat, since Study Mode doesn't run inside Projects. For lectures, pull the transcript and highlight the key lines with YouTube Summary.
- Make it tutor, not answer. Open Study and Learn or Study Mode and begin with something like "Tutor me on this. Don't solve it for me, even if I ask. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer." That mirrors the hints-not-answers instruction the PNAS trial's safe version ran on.
- End with retrieval. Close your notes, write down what you can recall, and then have the assistant quiz you on the gaps. Our guide to active recall explains why this beats re-reading.
- Come back in a few days. Reopen your saved flashcards, or ask Glasp's AI chat to quiz you on the passages you highlighted.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Copilot better than ChatGPT for studying?
Only if your school gives you a Microsoft 365 account. There, Copilot's Study and Learn agent turns your own files into practice quizzes and flashcards for free. On a personal account, ChatGPT is better for studying, because Study Mode, interactive quizzes, and saved flashcards all come with its free plan, while personal Copilot offers a lighter "Study and learn" chat mode.
Is Microsoft Copilot free for students?
Yes. Anyone 13 or older (older in some countries) can use the free Copilot app where it's available, within capacity limits and possibly with ads. Students whose schools have Microsoft 365 Education (A1, A3, or A5) also get Copilot Chat, the Study and Learn agent, and Copilot Notebooks at no extra cost, though K-12 schools must switch Copilot Chat on for students aged 13 to 17.
Does Copilot use ChatGPT?
Not ChatGPT itself, but largely the same family of OpenAI models. Copilot has leaned on OpenAI's GPT models since its Bing Chat days, Microsoft says its Think Deeper mode is powered by OpenAI's latest reasoning models, and licensed Microsoft Copilot also offers Anthropic's Claude where the school's license, region, and admin settings allow it. The apps, limits, study features, and privacy terms are Microsoft's own.
Does Copilot have a study mode like ChatGPT?
Yes. Personal accounts get a "Study and learn" mode that explains concepts and guides you toward the answer instead of handing it over. School accounts get the fuller Study and Learn agent, generally available since May 2026, with scored quizzes, flashcards, matching, and fill-in-the-blank activities grounded in your own documents. ChatGPT's equivalent is Study Mode, launched in July 2025 and now available on every plan.
Can my school see my Copilot chats?
On a school account, yes. Microsoft logs your prompts, the Bing searches they trigger, and Copilot's responses, and your IT admins can search and audit them. Those chats aren't used to train foundation models. Your personal-account chats stay separate from your school account, even inside the same app.
Is ChatGPT or Copilot more accurate?
Neither is reliably more accurate. In published exam studies, ChatGPT-4 beat Copilot on an Italian entrance exam (the gap wasn't statistically significant) and on a hand-surgery question bank (it was). Bing Chat, Copilot's predecessor, beat the GPT-3.5 version of ChatGPT on a Belgian medical licensing exam (76% to 67%, a gap the authors didn't test for significance), and Copilot edged ChatGPT-5 on a set of neurology questions. Both still make confident mistakes, so check any fact, number, or citation against your course material.
Is it cheating to use Copilot or ChatGPT for homework?
It depends on your course policy and on what you hand in. Using either one to quiz yourself or explain a concept is studying; submitting text it wrote as your own usually isn't allowed. Read your syllabus, and when in doubt, use the tutoring modes, which are built to make you do the work.
Should I use both Copilot and ChatGPT?
If your school gives you Copilot, yes. Use the Study and Learn agent for practice built from course files, and ChatGPT for quick questions, problem sets, and flashcards on the go. Keep your notes and highlights outside both apps, so switching assistants costs you nothing.
Conclusion
Copilot vs ChatGPT for studying comes down to your account, not to which one is smarter. With a school Microsoft 365 login, Copilot's Study and Learn agent is a well-designed free study tool built from your own course files. Without one, ChatGPT's free plan has more study tools, including flashcards you can come back to.
Whichever you open, make it quiz you rather than tell you. Save the passages you'll be tested on with Glasp as you read and watch, and quiz yourself on them a week later.
