A piece in today's NY Times discusses the New York Regents exam in which students performed worse than usual but the state is keeping the results.
The opening of the article is as follows:
Leonard Morochnick was so upset after 43 percent of his physics students at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies failed the Regents physics exam last month that he sat down at his computer and banged out a lengthy analysis of the test, which on one question required students to "calculate the de Broglie wavelength of a helium nucleus."
"This is one of the most esoteric topics in all of physics at any level, let alone a first-year physics course," Mr. Morochnick wrote.
But let's look at this a little closer. The question of concern is question 75 of 76 on the exam. (You can see the entire exam and solutions at the New York Board of Education website.)
The question about de Broglie wavelength defines the wavelength, lambda=h/(m*v) and gives the values of h, m and v. So what is being asked is for students to take one number, and divide it by two others. (The students also have to keep track of the units but that is no harder than anything else on the exam.)
Do you think that a senior should be able to divide one number by two others? If so, then what the hell is Morochnick complaining about? If not, what the hell are we doing graduating these students with any sort of knowledge of mathematics, let alone physics.
Morochnik's complaint is a complete red herring. In the Times article, we discover that the passing grade has increased considerably in recent years. That alone would cause the higher failure rate.
So let's worry about what is an appropriate pass rate, the only relevant question.
There are essentially no individual questions on the exam that a competent student shouldn't be able to answer. So all that remains is how long students have to complete the exam. They are given three hours to answer 76 questions. That's a little less than 2.5 minutes per question so there is no doubt that students need to keep working fast to complete the questions. However, the de Broglie question should be easily done in that allocation of time, as should many other questions.
So, in summary, all that needs to be established is how much of the paper should competent students be expected to answer in the time allowed. This is never an easy question to answer but teachers with some experience should be able to gauge this fairly accurately.
The problem appears to be merely a mismatch between the decisions made by different parts of the examination team. One group set the questions at the usual level of difficulty. The other insisted that students should be able to complete more of the paper to be competent.
In the end, this can only be resolved by deciding why you want students to pass this exam, and what understanding of the subject that students should have. Unfortunately, I am not confident that the bureaucrats who control education departments can resolve this well.
7:48:16 PM 
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