Chain-of-thought prompting

Asking the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps before the final answer, which measurably improves accuracy on multi-step arithmetic, logic, and planning tasks. It does less for tasks that were already a single lookup.

Why exams ask this

Tested as a reasoning-task question, not a general-purpose upgrade. The distractor applies it to a simple lookup or classification task, where it adds tokens and latency without improving the answer.

Relevant to

Related concepts

Resources

No resources linked to this concept yet.