Since a student can solve each question in 3 different ways - either he can attempt the first alternative ,or the second alternative or he can leave it unanswered.
Hence number of ways in which a student can attempt one or more of the 12 given questions =
Now we can consider a case that the student leave all the 12 given questions unanswered.
The number of ways, in which a student can select one or more questions out of 12 each having an alternative=
has three distinct eigenvalues and one of its eigenvectors is 
