Research in chemistry education has revealed that students going through their undergraduate and graduate studies in organic chemistry have a fragmented conceptual knowledge of the subject. Rote memorization, rule-based reasoning, and heuristic strategies seem to strongly influence students' performances. There appears to be a gap between what we believe students understand in organic chemistry and what they actually learn. In this report, findings are presented on how intuitive judgment processes governed organic chemistry students' unsuccessful and successful answering patterns in a traditional set of multiple-choice items. Analyzing the participants' approaches through the lens of associative processes in intuitive judgments contributes to the ongoing discussion about appropriate assessment in organic chemistry and encourages the improvement of the traditional curriculum in the discipline.