OK, I looked at the California Exit Exam -- I have a kid I am tutoring who needs to pass that, and it will be a miracle. That test is ridiculous. The first ten questions (in the test prep book) are about statistics; they use statistics buzzwords that I have never heard, and ask the most convoluted questions. In the years since high school, I have not used ONE of these concepts, ever, and probably would have gotten them all wrong.
How can that be right? It should be a test for basic reading and writing and arithmetic. The test I looked at is meaningless for assessing -- what? -- whether the student is ready to go on to a degree in statistics, I suppose. It reads like some smarmy, self-satisfied, Ivory Tower mathematician who never spends time with kids wrote it.
Mastery of twelfth grade work entails the following:
Three years of History, four years of English including composition, rhetoric, and literature, a foreign language, science through physics and (therefore) math through trigonometry and (certainly) statistics.
What kind of "exit exam" would test "basic reading, writing, and arithmetic"? The third grade exam?
Ohhh puhleaze!! I looked at it, and I think my 6th grader could pass it. Grant it, he's good at math, but it is not hard.
That may be more a matter of the prep book you're using than the actual test. The sample test problems that have been published in various newspaper articles are very simple (almost certainly 8th-grade level) math problems.