Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation transfers reasoning behaviors from a strong teacher to a smaller student, but prior work reports a capacity gap: distillation may fail when the teacher-student capability mismatch is large.
We revisit the capacity gap from a practical perspective by re-examining commonly used experimental settings.
Notably, we find that CoT distillation often degrades performance compared to the student's pre-distillation baseline, and that some settings used in prior work, while suitable for establishing the capacity gap as a phenomenon, do not reflect realistic deployment scenarios.
Complementing prior work that establishes the capacity gap, we evaluate its practical impact under more realistic settings and find that it does not consistently dominate; stronger teachers tend to be preferable when candidate teachers differ substantially in performance.
Our results offer practical guidance for selecting teacher-student pairs in CoT distillation.