This is a quick update for those who might be wondering if the New York Regents have changed their tune since my post last summer and the follow-up New York Post article.
The answer is: only the tiniest bit.
Let’s look at the January 2023 Regents exam in Algebra. Typically, this exam is taken by students who failed Algebra the previous year, who passed but want to try for a better score, or — most commonly in my experience — students whose school systems have enrolled them in a so-called 1.5 Algebra I course. This is a course that takes 1.5 years to finish the normally 1-year long Algebra curriculum. A school system will put kids into 1.5 algebra because they don’t think the kid has a good enough chance of passing the Algebra I exam after just one year of instruction.
Here is the grading chart for the January 23 Regents exam multiple choice section. This accounts for 48 of the total 86 credits on the test.
Remember last summer there were 9 C choices out of the 24, allowing a student to guess all Cs and earn 18 credits, which was enough to pass. This time, there are only 4 Cs. Maybe they learned!
Nah. Check out the Bs. There are 8 Bs. So if you guessed all Bs, you’d get 16 points from those guesses. How many points are needed to pass the test?
A student needs a scale score of 50 to pass the test. On the above chart, you can see that means the kid needs a 17 raw score, which is 19.8%. Does guessing all Bs get you that? Not quite this time. It only gets you 16 of the 17 points needed to pass. You would still need to answer correctly such difficult questions as #26.
This is not a hard algebra problem. This is not even a moderately difficult algebra problem. That’s because THIS IS NOT AN ALGEBRA PROBLEM.
Or, hey, maybe you’re a boy and you’re triggered by the Fun Central problem. Just couldn’t concentrate after the Fun Central Incident of ’18. Well then you’d have to try to get your one remaining point from such mind-benders as #33.
Once again, THIS IS NOT AN ALGEBRA PROBLEM.
TL;DR The Regents improved by one or two iotas, but it’s hard to tell if the improvement was accidental or not. This time you’d have to guess all Bs and then be able to do a 5th-grade percentage problem or a 5th-grade graph problem in order to pass your high school Algebra I exam. If you guessed randomly (that is, if you didn’t get lucky by choosing B as your talisman answer), your expected value would be 12 points from the multiple choice. In that case, you’d need to get BOTH of the 5th-grade problems correct in order to pass. Oh, the horror.
