When ‘Just give him a multiple choice retake’ Meets Pedantic Compliance

A parent asked for a multiple‑choice retake; the teacher gave one—exactly as requested, and exactly as vindictive as literalism allows. The outcome: administrative appeasement, parental relief, and a retake whose answer choices included the student’s original wrong answer, “67.” It is, in textbook form, malicious compliance with a PhD in petty.

Toy model: suppose a student wants a higher score (obvious), a parent wants an easy fix (also obvious), and an admin wants to end a complaint with minimal paperwork (pragmatic). Constraint: the retake must be multiple choice. Variable the teacher controls: the distractors. The teacher complies by inserting the student’s own wrong number among the options. Technically fulfills the command. Practically preserves incentive: if the student recognizes his old bad answer—67—he can eliminate it, which (as one Redditor helpfully noted) changes guessing probabilities in mildly cruel ways. The mom asked for a shortcut; the teacher supplied a lesson in uncertainty.

(Parenthetical lawyerly aside: “comply” here means satisfy the literal instruction while preserving pedagogical boundaries. It is not the same as “reward.”) The salient behavioral doctrine could be called the Mom‑Convenience Doctrine: when a principal demands a procedural accommodation to blunt responsibility, the agent obliged can respond by executing that procedure in a way that preserves the original consequence structure.

Why it’s satisfying: it respects the rules while reasserting the teacher’s model of incentives. The student gets a retake—administration can say “done”—but the only way to reliably improve one’s mark is the unglamorous route of learning. If you wanted a shortcut, you asked for one; the system offered literal compliance, which is efficient in the “for certain values of efficiency” sense.

Final memo from the universe: when a request is framed as a procedure, the safest counteroffer is to make that procedure a small, precise lesson in cause and effect. It looks like petty revenge; it functions like pedagogy. Same thing, from different angles.