I'm genuinely confused at the criticism of the content of the questions and especially the criticism that they're "not hard". I mean, I guess they aren't algebra in the sense of "use the quadratic formula," but I'm not sure that's a useful sense. The question about percentages and the one about reading the graph are both eminently practical questions, ones that very directly respond to the algebra student's "When are we going to use this in real life" plea. I can see people needing to know this in any practical field of work - and I can realistically see people not knowing it, too. And plugging numbers into the quadratic formula isn't hard, either. It's a matter of knowing the definition, which is precisely a thing the author criticizes, and it's much more direct and mindless application of the definition than that question about whether a certain number is rational.

(And is it supposed to be hard, or a good thing if it's hard? The goal should be that everyone passes; nobody needs a weed-out ninth grade math class. The questions should be meaningful, yes, and they should show that you actually understand the subject. But this is a subject we would, ideally, want everyone to understand well.)

The actual June 2022 Algebra I Regents exam is available online and you can see what the questions look like: https://www.nysedregents.org/algebraone/622/algone62022-exam... Most of them look like conventional algebra to me. And there is indeed one use-the-quadratic-formula question!

(The criticism that a zero-bits-of-information response passes is certainly valid, and could be easily solved by subtracting fractional points for incorrect answers, a common approach on other standardized tests.)