Please consider supporting Citizens Union Foundation’s public education programs. Critical early support to Gotham Gazette was provided by the Charles H. Revson Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Your teachers can assist you, but you have to take charge and prepare independently, too. If you’re struggling with something, ask your teacher or a private English tutor for help. Take a look at your previous English tests to figure out your weak areas, and work on improving them.

Read through our guides on what high school students should do over the summer (besides summer assignments), including pre-college summer programs, SAT/ACT boot camp, or getting a job. Unless you have an IEP or are an English language learner, you need to meet the Regents diploma requirements to graduate high school. The New York State Education Department (NYSED) Regents exams are subject-based tests generally taken at the end of the school year in June (although there are also August and January test dates for makeups/mid-year exams). By subject-based, we mean that you aren’t just tested on broad categories like “Math” or “Science”—instead, you’ll take Regents in specific subjects, like Algebra 1, Chemistry, US History & Government, and so on. The Regents exams, as with any standardized test, have strict rules and protocols to quell attempts to cheat.
Students indicate their answers by filling out scannable answer sheets with #2 pencils. It’s best to not bring your phone with you at all, but most schools do designate an area where students can leave their phones while taking the test. If you bring your phone, make sure to turn it off before the test, because if it goes off during the test, you could lose points. Students have the opportunity to take Regents Exams in grades 9-12 and, when appropriate, in grade eight. Students may also take Regents exams after leaving high school to earn a diploma. Whether you’re ready to begin tutoring immediately or just have questions about these tests, our client services team is looking forward to speaking with you!
You’ll talk to a knowledgeable, caring individual who will create a test prep plan and pair you with the perfect tutor for your student’s personality and learning style. Remember, our focus on high-stakes testing doesn’t stop our grade-abated work. ELA tests especially incorporate many of the skills and traits of grade abatement proper. You want to understand their interior logic and the logic of the test-makers. There are three times each year when students can take Regents exams — January, June and August.
To develop skills specific to public discourse, speaking and listening modules guide students as they evaluate clips and readings from speeches and discussions. In language modules, students build foundational grammar skills they need to articulate their ideas and understand challenging words. Though all public schools are required to follow either the Regents Exam system or some form of alternative assessment, private schools need not. The vast majority of private schools do use Regents exams and award Regents diplomas, but some, usually academically prestigious private schools, do not. These schools’ argument is that their own diploma requirements exceed Regents standards. Schools run by the Society of Jesus, such as Canisius High School, Fordham Prep, McQuaid Jesuit, Regis and Xavier, and by the Society of Mary (Marianists), such as Chaminade and Kellenberg, have not used Regents exams for decades.
The Safety Net for the ELA Regents examination will enable eligible ELLs who begin their formal schooling in grade 9, 10, 11 or 12 to earn a local diploma through the appeal process. During the 1990s, some alternative assessment schools were founded in parts of New York in an attempt to provide a way for students to graduate from high school without taking any Regents Exams. Usually, the substitute graduation assessment consisted of a review and grading, by a panel of teachers, of an academic portfolio – a collection of the student’s best work from all his or her years at the school. From such a “portfolio examination” would be issued a “Regents equivalency” grade for the areas of Math, English, History, and Science, and a “Regents Equivalency” diploma would be awarded to the student at commencement. Students enrolled in these schools do, however, take the English Language Arts Regents exam as a part of the New York State school accountability system.
Parents and advocates are concerned that students are not being tested in their subject knowledge, and that too often, a student’s low level of English robs them of the chance to score well on their math, science, or social studies exams. Many of these students have a great deal of knowledge in the subject area in which they are being tested (like earth science or math), but because the tests are administered in English, they may score poorly because they do not know English well. The standing committee will be comprised of the school principal as chair, three teachers (not including the teacher of the student making the appeal), and one additional administrator. The committee will review an appeal within ten school days of its receipt and make a recommendation to the school superintendent, or Chancellor of the City School District of the City of New York (or his/her designee), to accept or deny the appeal. The standing committee may interview the teacher or department chairperson who recommended the appeal as well as the student making the appeal to determine if the student has demonstrated the knowledge and skills required under the state learning standards in the subject area in question. Many English language learners who first enter school in the United States in high school are not graduating in four years.
The format of each Regents Exam depends upon the subject that is being tested. Some questions are multiple choice while others require written responses—including essays, DBQs, and other open-ended questions. Most Regents Exams are three hours long—with the exception of Earth Science, which has an additional laboratory component. Yes, students can take each Regents Exam as many times as they want, but their guidance counselors must help them register well in advance of the test date. Bespoke has been helping students succeed on these exams for nearly two decades.
We’ll go through the testing requirements for those two categories in greater detail next. Depending on the subject, Regents exams will include multiple-choice questions and short-answer questions or essay responses (including document-based questions). Based on your performance, you’ll receive a scaled score from on each test. Opponents of this idea say that creating different standards for English-language learners does them a disservice by not preparing them as well as those students who are native English-speakers. Advocates of the alternative test counter that an alternative exam would set an appropriately high standard that reflects the background and experiences of recently-arrived students.
In 2005, the Board of Regents began modifying the mathematics curriculum. An integrated approach that taught topics in geometry and algebra during each of three years, with exams like “Math A” and “Math B” normally taken after a year and a half and again after three years, was replaced by a curriculum that divides topics into Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. Each of these take the form of a one-year course with a Regents Examination at the end of the year.
At the same time, the data is likely fodder for advocates who have called for the state to stop requiring the Regents exams to graduate. Our new student and parent forum, at ExpertHub.PrepScholar.com, allow you to interact with your peers and the PrepScholar staff. See how other students and parents are navigating high school, college, and the college admissions process. You need a working definition, which is a little different from a dictionary definition. Look online for examples of unfamiliar writing strategies, use this page to ask questions, and share your understanding through Google+.
They argue that requiring recently-arrived students to take an English Regents exam designed for native speakers who have grown up speaking, reading, and writing English unfairly sets up these students to fail and drop out. Immigrant students, parents, and community leaders have been advocating for the Board of Regents, the Governor, and the State Legislature to address the dropout crisis by establishing an alternative English proficiency test for late-arriving students to be able to graduate. There is no shortage of materials students can access for their English Regents preparation. The Internet is brimming with free resources for the Regents exams—you can find tons of study material online and even YouTube channels dedicated to helping students prepare. You can find Regents exams from previous years and use them to take mock exams.
But as Miss Brill wondered, the ermine toque turned, raised her hand as though she’d seen some one else, much nicer, just over there, and pattered away. And the band changed again and played more quickly, more gayly than ever, and the old couple on Miss Brill’s seat got up and marched away, and such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast. Results are used for student high school graduation requirements, school quality reports, and teacher development and evaluation. The Regents exams are scored by licensed and trained New York City teachers, and follows NY State Education Department policies on scoring of State exams.

The Catcher in the Rye: NYS Common Core English Regents Part 2 (Argument)

In 2014, the Board of Regents created the 4+1 option, where students must pass at least 4 regents exams—one per subject—and pass one additional Regents exam in any subject. It’s also important to note that many high schools had large numbers of students exempt from the exam, due to the cancellation of some administrations. Students planning to take one or more Regents exams during August 2021 and January 2022 examination periods are exempt from the requirements pertaining to passing such Regents examination to be issued a diploma, according to the state education department. Research has found little evidence that requiring high-stakes graduation exams improves student achievement, and doing so may actually increase dropout rates for struggling students. The English exams can be particularly hard on English learners, advocates and researchers said. Sugarman said she often hears from educators about students who have passed all of their classes, but can’t pass the English Regents exam.
The June 2020, August 2020, and January 2021, then later, August 2021 and January 2022 exams were not administered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Toribio, the student who graduated in 2020, went on to attend community college. But he stopped attending because he was struggling to pay for school, according to an advocate who has helped him in the past. He felt that his teachers had done all they could to prepare him, but it was tough to pass the exam while also juggling a challenging course load, including several Advanced Placement classes. As a NY public school student, Regents are an inescapable fact of life, but you can use them to your advantage. You don’t have to study for hours every night, but giving yourself enough lead time before the test means you’ll have more flexibility in the amount of time you spend on each unit.

The Masters School, The Ursuline School, The Hackley School, The Harvey School, Long Island Lutheran Middle & High School, Manlius Pebble Hill School, and Nichols School also do not use the Regents system. In New York State, Regents Examinations are statewide standardized examinations in core high school subjects. Students are required to pass these exams to earn a Regents Diploma. To graduate, students are required to have earned appropriate credits in a number of specific subjects by passing year-long or half-year courses, after which they must pass at least five Regents examinations in some of the subject areas. For higher-achieving students, a Regents with Advanced designation and an Honors designation are also offered. Students with disabilities or enrolled in an English as a Second Language program are able to earn a local diploma.

Regents Diploma Requirements

This is particularly ironic in a test that purports to measure students’ ability to analyze and decipher literary messages and techniques. In each module, the Learn It and Try It make complex ideas accessible through focused content, guided analysis, multi-modal representations, and personalized feedback as students reason through increasingly challenging problems. The Review It offers a high impact summary of key concepts and relates those concepts to students’ lives. The Test It assesses students’ mastery of the module’s concepts, providing granular performance data to students and teachers after each attempt. To help students concentrate on the content most relevant to them, unit-level pretests and posttests can quickly identify where students are strong and where they’re still learning. Generally, a student in a New York State public school needs to pass five of the ten Regents exams in order to graduate from high school.
Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master’s degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel in high school. For example, as an eighth-grader I took Regents Earth Science, which was the honors science class for that grade (vs. regular Earth Science), and so had to take the Regents at the end of the year (because that’s what my school required). For other classes, the Regents exams were not only required at the end of the year, but were part of our grades for the final quarter of the year, so it behooved us to try to do well on them. In some cases, students may be entitled to take the test in their native language or have an interpreter read them the questions in their native language.
Unless you choose one of the alternate Pathway options, this means that you’ll need to take five Regents exams (and get a 65 or above on each) to graduate. Now that you have a better idea of what the Regents are, we’ll move on to discussing how many Regents exams you have to take. The four Science Regents exams (Earth Science, Living Environment, Chemistry, and Physics) also include separately-scheduled lab practicals; you can read more about these in our articles about the Earth Science, Living Environment, and Chemistry Regents.
While I didn’t do this, I know people who did, and rushing to get to school before the deadline and then rushing through the test is not super conducive to scoring well. Spreading out your studying also means you’ll be sleeping in between studying, which will help cement your memory of all that information you’re reading and quizzing yourself on. However, we also have a few general Regents prep tips that are applicable to studying for any Regents exam.
Leaving aside questions of copyright law and fair use, we find the practice intellectually dishonest and at odds with a sound understanding of First Amendment principles. Those principles hold that government officials have no business censoring literary works in order to impose a “pall of orthodoxy” over the educational experience even if the literary works offend some readers. As the passages on recent Regents exams reveal, the Department of Education’s practice robs the literary selections of both form and substance, since many works of insight or relevance will contain material that may offend someone. Students are deceived and intellectually impoverished by a censorship scheme that elevates hypersensitivity over truth.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. NYSED might not care if you get an A or a C as long as you pass the New York State Regents, but colleges certainly do. Learn what a good GPA is for college and how to convert your GPA to a 4.0 here. The only thing to be cautious of is overloading yourself, particularly if you have final exams in addition to the Regents in a particular subject. Speaking as someone who took the US History Regents, US History AP, and US History SAT Subject Test all within a month of each other at the end of junior year, burnout can be a very real thing.

The Part III Text Analysis is scored on a 4-point rubric and then weighted × 2. All records relating to appeals must be maintained by the school and available for inspection by NYSED. Appeals must also be reported to NYSED at the conclusion of each school year.

As with getting a Regents with Honors diploma, unless you’re applying to a SUNY or CUNY college which uses your Regents diploma level as a placement or admissions criteria, there’s no real benefit in specifically aiming for a Regents with Advanced Designation diploma. People from the community asked Mr. Barron about books that might be available to help their children study for the New York State Regents exams. After realizing there wasn’t anything available, Mr. Barron created his own study guides. Gotham Gazette is published by Citizens Union Foundation and is made possible by support from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the John S. And James L. Knight Foundation, the Altman Foundation,the Fund for the City of New York and donors to Citizens Union Foundation.
For students entering 9th grade in September 2019 and thereafter, the Local Diploma is only offered to disabled students. Students with an Individualized Education Program or 504 plan are able to obtain a local diploma through ‘safety nets’. Similar to the regents diploma, the local diploma is recognized as a high school diploma, which would allow the student to attend college, enroll in the military, and have jobs that require a high school diploma. General Education students can only obtain the local diploma by appealing 2 regents exams. Students with disabilities must still have the appropriate number of credits to graduate.
Currently, local school districts can develop their own exams to assess foreign language competency and allow for students to meet the Advanced Designation requirement. Juanmy Moscoso, an English learner who graduated in 2021, took the English Regents exam five times before passing it, finally succeeding his junior year of high school, three years after he first moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic. He was part of the minority of English learners who passed the exam prior to graduating in 2021. The majority of NY public school students will graduate with either a regular Regents diploma or a Regents with Advanced Designation diploma.

Parts II and III of the ELA Regents are scored using holistic rubrics. Part II is scored using a six-credit rubric, and Part III is scored using a four-credit rubric. Both rubrics reflect the demands called for by the Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy through the end of Grade 11. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘regent.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Get real time school updates on your mobile device with eChalk Notify. We are working to make this website easier to access for people with disabilities, and will follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.