RESEARCH ARTICLE Benford’s Law: Textbook Exercises and

Benford’s Law describes the finding that the distribution of leading (or leftmost) digits of innumerable datasets follows a well-defined logarithmic trend, rather than an intuitive unifor-mity. In practice this means that the most common leading digit is 1, with an expected frequency of 30.1%, and the least common is 9, with an expected frequency of 4.6%. Cur-rently, the most common application of Benford’s Law is in detecting number invention and tampering such as found in accounting-, tax-, and voter-fraud. We demonstrate that an-swers to end-of-chapter exercises in physics and chemistry textbooks conform to Benford’s Law. Subsequently, we investigate whether this fact can be used to gain advantage over random guessing in multiple-choice tests, and find that while testbank answers in introduc-tory physics closely conform to Benford’s Law, the testbank is nonetheless secure against such a Benford’s attack for banal reasons