25percentcpa,
Thanks, I find that understanding a test makes taking it easier. Anyways to your point. Maybe if there was some sort of human judgement involved in determining how hard to rate a question I would agree, but other than determining what factors to analize it's not very subjective. I'm not sure I can describe it any better than they can so here is what the AICPA has to say about it:
“How do you decide which questions are hard and which are moderate?
The difficulty of the test questions (and other statistics that are used to describe each test question) are determined through statistical analysis of candidate responses. Question difficulty is not a category (e.g. moderate or hard), but is a numeric value along a scale (e.g. 1.5)…”
That's taken from a document I've found somewhat insightful which is located at https://www.cpa-exam.org/download/How_the_CPA_Exam_is_Scored.pdf
However, I do agree with the larger point I think you're trying to make which is that it seems like the AICPA is being overly secretive with the grading procedures and they could make all of this speculation go away by publishing the complete grading procedures (even a simplified version of it) like most standardized exams I've dealt with.
AUD 81 - BEC 89 - FAR 82 - REG 86