IntelliJ "apply patch" doesn't use Git

The class I'm on staff for historically distributed updates to its assignment as patches generated by git diff. Students would apply them to their projects with the VCS | Apply Patch feature of IntelliJ (Android Studio, in our case). This appeared to work pretty well, but eventually I noticed a case where not all changes from the patch were actually applied to the project. Apparently the "apply patch" feature is not powered by Git, even in Git diffs for Git projects. Using git apply from the Terminal tab works better.