Well I believe this is partially spawned from the mentality that surrounds the CTEs in general. As I am sure that other members will attest to, the current mentality about CTEs is that they need to be rediculously hard and that XXX number of people should fail them.
When I was at Protohell, we would be given CTE questions that were something along the lines of "Explain in detail the procedure for ______________(insert really obscure evolution that occurs once in a blue moon and that you had training on over a month and a half ago). The only way to get full credit was to memorize the procedure step for step, memorize the stuff in the margins of why you did each step, and all the possible indications the evolution with affect. We even had a Radcon problem that took over 2.5 hours to go through the PowerPoint Lecture, yet were expected to answer it and several other questions in less than 1 hour. Furthermore, you would be deducted points if you didn't state every single assumption such as "assume that 3 feet is approx. 1 meter" or "ELT will take approx. 2.5 hours to clean up spill of which 3/4 of liquid is assumed to land on deck, 3/16 of liquid assumed to land in bilge, and 1/16 of liquid assumed was drank by ELT".
When the CTEs get to a rediculous level and depth, for the sole purpose of driving down the grades, then there is going to be the tempatation for cheating the system. Add to that the consequences of failing a CTE(such as having to come in at 0700 the next week when you are on supposed to be on swing shift) even furthers the likelihood that some people are going to do everything in their power to ensure they pass. I am sure that there will be a huge knee jerk reaction, especially because the public image is tarnished, that will bring to light the disparity between what is asked on various exams and what is considered an "average" LOK. Maybe then it the NNPP will do away with the concept that you have to have "token" failures and the grades have to be in a certain range. If you have a really good training department, I fully expect that ships grades to be higher than a ship that has a lousy training department. Of course the only true measurement would be standardized tests across the fleet for all nukes of each vessel class for CTEs, Watch Quals, Etc.