I’m intrigued by the concpt of a test that is seen to be unfair when 60% of the takers fail it.
Test thrown out
I would like to look at a test, or barring the whole thing, some sample questions, but have been unable to find any on-line. Can anyone help?
This page has PDF’s of this exam and previous ones.
It doesn’t look particularly difficult to me. Not any worse than the SAT for instance. There are some rather involved word problems, which tend to give people a lot of trouble if you don’t know your stuff.
I do not know if these questions were taken from the Regents Math A exam that was discarded. I also do not know if these questions accurately reflect the difficulty of the exam, but here are some sample questions:
I certainly hope that that was not from the discarded test, because that wasn’t difficult at all.
That’s a test for graduating students? You’ve got to be joking me. I looked through the test, and there’s three questions that I couldn’t figure out how to do just by looking at them. I wish that my final exams this year had been that easy.
As someone who has taken it recently (though not this year), I would just like to say that it is not hard at all, just annoying.
I strongly doubt that New York’s standards are as high as Mills claims if 63% of students received scores of less than 55. How are the other states’ public schools doing?
I had to take this thing a few years ago. sleeping is right. It’s annoying, and preparing for it is annoying. But the Regents is not that hard. I loathe standardized testing for a lot of reasons. But the problem here is not that the test is too difficult.
Back when I took it in the early 80s I don’t think it was required for graduation from your school, but it was required for what was called a Regent’s Diploma.
At my High School graduation everyone got a Diploma from our school, and a subset also got a Regent’s Diploma. You had to pass several of these tests on a variety of subjects to get one, but it wasn’t that hard. I don’t think I got less than an 85/100 on any Regents exam I took.
Is the standard testing done by you american guys normally consist of multiple choice questions?
They just recently eliminated the option for graduation without a Regent’s diploma in NYS. ALL students must pass a certain number of exams (including the one in question) to get a high school diploma in New York. I have been too busy this week to follow the actual debate about this particular test, but I think that the problem wasn’t with the empirical “difficulty” of the test, but with the fact that the test had questions in different types of problems than had been studied in class. The reason this is an issue is that in many, perhaps most schools in New York, teachers have been reduced to teaching the entire year from review books aimed solely at getting the students to pass the Regents in that subject. This isn’t necessarily because the teacher is lazy, but it really can be the only way to get a diverse group of students on the same page enough so that they all pass the test they need to graduate.
That’s a test for graduating students? You’ve got to be joking me. I looked through the test, and there’s three questions that I couldn’t figure out how to do just by looking at them. I wish that my final exams this year had been that easy.
Yes that is true, most Regents exams are not hard at all by the standards of many (myself included). however, when the entire thrust of the class was following problems in a review book for the test, and then the students walk into the testing room (at my school, the gym) and see a whole new set of problems which are not more difficult, but which they have not learned to solve, those students have had the rug yanked out from under them.
Again, the tests are not difficult, or should not be for anyone remotely considering higher education, but it is important to remember that not everyone needs the same skills. Everyone, however, needs a high school diploma. It is getting harder and harder to get even unskilled labor jobs without them (I have no cite for this, just a number of acquaintances, so somebody find a way to prove me wrong).
Most of it, yeah. Some of the regents (U.S. History and Social Studies, for example) require some short written questions and an essay or two.
That test is a joke for graduating. Another thing for foreigners for which foreigners can laugh at us 
The Math A is not exactly a test for graduating students, as Rysko asks. You need to pass the test to graduate, but you usually take it halfway through your sophomore year.
New York state has been screwing with the Regents exams the past several years. The math situation is just plain preposterous. Instead of learning algebra, geometry, and trig for on year each, they put the three curricula in a blender, so you learn them all at once. The prevents students from learning things step by step because just as they’re beginning to get the hand of, say, algebra, they switch to geometry. By the time they get back to algebra, so much time has passed that the basics have become fuzzy and it become harder to learn.
The Regents are run by a moron named Mills who seems to think the way to improve education is to make harder tests. Teachers can’t teach subjects; they have to teach what is covered on the Regents. He has no interest in educating kids; he just wants to make everyone pass the test – and without giving teachers any clear idea of what they need to teach kids in order to do so.
This fiasco was so bad that the Regents allowed changes (like any other corrupt organization, the Regents are usually incapable of admitting they made a mistake, so it had to be pretty bad).
The tests might look simple to you, but you were probably taught the subject in a logical manner and probably retained it better than someone going on a random walk through mathematics.
BTW, the math Regents are not just multiple choice; many questions are graded on showing your work. Getting the answer is 1 point out of 5; you need to show how you got it in order to get the other four.
Sorry to stray off topic again but if a test is multiple choice do they apply negative marking i.e. deduct marks for an incorrect answer to prevent guessing?
Last night I downloaded and took the test from the link provided by SmackFu.
The test consists of 4 parts. Part 1 is 20 multiple-choice questions, worth 2 credits each. There are 4 choices for each question, and no points off for guessing. Also, the test instructions say to award full credit if the taker has written the correct answer, rather than write the index 1-4 corresponding to the correct answer.
I would say about 6 questions are mostly definitional, ex: which shape does not have rotational symmetry? 1)trapezoid 2)regular pentagon 3)circle 4)square. I actually don’t like this question, because a circle can be rotated any value around it’s center and correspond to the first position. The square and triangle are invariant under rotations of 90 and 72 degrees, but the trapezoid also map back to itself after 360 degrees. Ya I know, that’s the identity of this symmetry group of one element, but I think they could have made a better question about rotational sym.
I missed this one: Pick the inverse of the statement “If Julie works hard, then she succeeds”. I had a little to drink last night and picked the converse instead of the inverse. There is another question on the test which requires you to know that a statement and it’s contrapositive (though def. is not used) are logically equivlaent.
I also did not like this question: “If the expression 3 - 4^2 + 6/2 is evaluated, what should be done last?”. 1)subtracting, 2)squaring, 3)adding 4)dividing. The actual typsetting has the squaring with a superscript 2, and the last division is shown with a small 6 over a horizontal bar over a small 2. Obviously, they want to see if you understand that exponentiation has highest priority, then division, mult., and last adding and subtracting. However, adding 3 and 3 and then subtracting 16 is a perfectly fine way to compute this result.
Part II has 5 problems worth 2 credits each. I missed part of two questions. One asked about a geometric construct I did not recognize: A “median” from an angle to the opposite side in a triangle.
Part III has 5 problems worth 3 credits, part IV 5 questions worth 4 credits. I objected to the scoring criteria for one problem in the last section. The instructions are to graph y = -x^2 + 20x. It says to sketch a graph of the arc… However, the grading instructions say to give only 3/4 if the parabola is drawn, but no table of values or labeled points are shown. The question did not ask for these.
From the instructions, it appears a passing score is greater than 46 credits.