this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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Couldn't you argue that 0% is correct?
It's a paradox, no of the answers can be correct, so the chance that you pick the correct one is 0%.
Sure, by picking it, it makes it wrong, but you don't care about that.
If you ran a infite monte carlo test on it, you'd end up with 0% correct answers.
Sure, picking the zero makes it not true again, but you don't care about that - it prooves that the statistical test holds.
Nah it's a paradox. There's no such thing as just a freestanding Monte Carlo test that you can just "run" - you do actually need to define enough parameters to make it tell you anything.
This kind of self-referential stuff feels like a proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems with extra steps.
The trick is that there is no paradox, only the implication of one. 'If' being the key word - you're not actually being asked to answer randomly, but you are being subtly trolled.
You do not need to pick at all for the paradox to exist. If either A or D is correct, the other is also correct, and the random odds of selecting the correct answer should have been 50%. This is a contradiction. Neither A nor D can be the correct answer.
If B is correct, the random odds of selecting it is only 25% - a contradiction, so B cannot be correct. Likewise, if C is correct, there is a 25% chance of randomly picking C. C is also not correct.
None of the four answers is correct, so there is a 0% chance of randomly picking the correct answer. C is correct, contradiction, C is not correct, C is correct, is not, is too, etc.
The paradox is resolved by knowing the the scantron answer key has A selected. D is not sufficiently identical to A in javascript, so only the students that randomly guessed the correct answer will get credit.
Because the paradox can only be resolved with either A or D as the selected answer, well informed students picking randomly would have a 50% success rate.
But why is C a contradiction? I'm not randomly picking it.
Because your c is their c. If you were right then those randomly choosing test takers are also right.
Why is their C my C? They're randomly choosing, I'm picking the right answer which is 0%.
Because it's the same question and same options! Choosing 0% implies those who randomly selected it were right!