An important innovation in the Western Australian physical science curriculum has been the introduction of a new Year 11 and Year 12 Physics syllabus designed to be more relevant to the needs of female students. The new Physics syllabus was taught in Year 12 and examined, in the Tertiary Entrance Examinations, for the first time in 1994. The new Physics syllabus differs from the old syllabus in several ways that enhance increased participation and achievement of girls. The teaching and assessment emphases have changed away from the standard application of mathematical type formulae towards a greater role for laboratory work, the topics are embedded in contexts to emphasise the applied nature of physics and its links to technology and engineering, and the social relevance of physics is included. The format of 1994 Western Australian Tertiary Entrance Examination in Physics reflected this syllabus change by contextualising the problems and introducing a new section in which students were required to respond to questions requiring comprehension and interpretation of written material rather than the solution of numerical problems. The aim of this study was to investigate whether or not the performance of girls relative to boys had improved in the 1994 Tertiary Entrance Examinations in Physics when the new syllabus was first examined. To check for relative improvement, the results of the 1993 examination of the old syllabus were used as the baseline data. Comparisons of raw examination marks, school assessments and final scaled combined scores in Physics were made for males and females of equal ability, as determined by their Tertiary Entrance Score. The Rasch model was used to determine item characteristics curves for each item on the 1994 Physics paper, for males and females, in each section of the 1994 paper to determine any differences in the functioning of the items. The results of this analysis indicate that, as intended, performance of girls on the 1994 paper shows a relative improvement over the performance of girls in the previous year.