# Noticing a Teacher's Password Pattern

Yudkowsky writes about [Guessing the Teacher's Password](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password) as an abstract educational concept. At a young age, perhaps ten years old, I had guessed one commonly used meta-password: In the Finnish school system it's typical for multiple choice answers to include options that are somewhat similar, and often the actual answer can be reasoned without knowing much at all about the actual topic. Here's an example from [2024 admission exam for technical universities](https://files.mafy.fi/website-files/DI-kokeet/DI-valintakoe-2024_kysymykset.pdf). I know no chemistry beyond elementary school, and you might not know any Finnish. That matters not:

![image.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1774168645/lexical_client_uploads/r8q34xb9sh4dom7bkc5v.png)

Naively one might think that repeating the PHV-thing seen in the description would mean picking D. Unfortunately, we have better tools: teachers generate incorrect answers by either taking completely nonsensical things, or by varying only one feature of the correct answer at a time.

Just by looking at the pictures, we can see that D doesn't share the right-hand OH group every other compound has. So that's not the answer. Next we see that B is missing the downwards-going carbon branch (and so is D). So that is not the answer, either. We're left deciding between A and C. But A and B share the same squiggly mid-lane carbons. So the answer must be A.

I'm using overly strong terms here. Not every exam or every teacher uses this format. But so many do that it's extremely useful to notice this. In fact, this that's the case here: the actual answer is B. Still, it clearly point us to the fact that D, which is most dissimilar to others but really close to the given example is wasn't the right answer.

Let's do another one, this time with text only, from the [2022 admission exam](https://files.mafy.fi/website-files/DI-kokeet/DI_valintakoe_2022_kysymykset.pdf):

![image.png](https://res.cloudinary.com/lesswrong-2-0/image/upload/v1774169520/lexical_client_uploads/u5ely0cplyyeq0wb22r0.png)

Again, we can simply look into the textual structure. All except B share the same first number, so it's not B. But the option A shares the same numbers as B, except that the order has been swapped. This means that the answer must be A.

In both these cases, the logic gives the correct answer. But not all questions are like this. If the options do not have the structure that has these similarities, using this method will not work. But at least I've learned to recognize this form over the years. Even though it's quite reliable, I normally wouldn't answer the questions using it. But if that doesn't match my calculated answer, I'd double- and triple-check before accepting it.

This reminds me quite a bit about pattern recognition in general IQ testing. Not sure what to think about that, yet. It would be a mistake to teach this trick to people who haven't noticed it themselves; I'm pretty sure such clever tricks hindered my studies at least a bit. A mild infohazard, even, perhaps. I still feel rather comfortable publishing this here, take that as you wish.