When did the need arise to go to 'Higher Order' questions with deviously designed wording to intentionally trip up the test taker instead of attempting to discern the true absorption and comprehension of the materials presented during requal training? More and more the questions seem to be more aligned to how devious the tester can be or how intense the test can be made rather than test the subject and determine the capability of the student/operator. Is this a developing trend or has my plant training just lagged behind the rest?
The NRC changed its requirements in the late 90's to drive this. Having been the author of numerous license exams, the ideal question from the NRC's perspective would have ~80-90% of qualified people select the correct answer, with the wrong answers being evenly split. The distractors need to be "plausible" which means there has to be a reason why it could be picked, i.e. common misconception, confusion of equipment, etc. It takes a lot of effort (sometimes mistaken as deviousness or trickiness) to come up with 3 plausible distractors for every question.
The key to prevent 'trick questions' is rigorous validation by qualified individuals. I have had many a time where a question has gone through three or more iterations before the operators would agree it was satisfactory AND a high enough percentage got it right. The result is a test where someone can walk out thinking they bombed it yet score a 94 (which has happened, I just had to ignore the comments he made as he was walking past me post-exam).
The rules also changed so you limited the number of "log cognitive level" questions to no more than 50%. These are simple recall, like setpoints or rules. The rest have to be "high cognitive level" where you have to remember multiple things, predict or troubleshoot, etc. These take more time to take, but with proper validation the results aren't much different than simple memory questions.
In the old days, you could memorize the answers or immediately throw out one or two distractors. That doens't happen anymore.