Friday, October 30, 2026
New York state is about to make a gigantic mistake.
The Board of Regents’ vote last month to eliminate Regents exams as a graduation requirement will further erode any standard of measuring student achievement, and eliminate the last remains of accountability in schools. What’s more, it threatens to destroy the very concept it purports to defend: equity.
And I say this as a teacher for 20 years who has been critical of state exams in the past.
The Regents have existed in New York since the Civil War. (Visit jmap.org if you want to see what math Regents looked like in the 1860s.) The exams were used as a measure of student learning on everything from history to homemaking. Yes, there was once a Regents in homemaking, featuring questions like “Labels on draperies are least likely to indicate …?”
The tests have become a permanent feature of our state’s educational landscape. That’s because, contrary to what you might hear, standardized exams are an excellent way to measure student learning.
The Regents weren’t always compulsory for graduation, however. They were once optional, reserved for students who could handle their academic rigor. But even in my high school days, students still had to pass mandatory, standardized competency exams in order to get a diploma.
Then, about 25 years ago, the state decided to make the Regents mandatory, in the interest of raising the academic bar. It sounded like a good idea, but it only weakened graduation standards in the long run. That’s because the exams had to be watered down to ensure that weaker students could pass them and graduate. Passing grades were lowered for students with disabilities. To get a 65 on this June’s algebra Regents, for example, a student needed to earn just 29 out of 82 possible points — a score, if you know your basic math, of about 35 percent.
So, year after year, we began graduating weaker students. And now the Board of Regents is eliminating the exam requirement altogether.
The Regents won’t completely disappear. The plan is to make them optional, but now students will be judged fit to graduate by myriad criteria at a school district’s disposal. Though the details are still vague, some of the terms I’ve heard kicked around include portfolios, classroom assessments, teacher observations and performance-based learning experiences.
This is what frightens me most. Who will determine whether students choosing these pathways to graduate are in fact worthy of graduating? It’ll be virtually impossible.
State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa applauded the move, saying it will create a more equitable system in which a student’s opportunity for success won’t be dictated by their background or ZIP code.
Nonsense. It will do the opposite.
How is the state supposed to ensure that students everywhere are following the same rigorous curricula without statewide exams that all must take to demonstrate learning?
My guess is that students in affluent, well-resourced school districts will benefit from the new policy. They’ll have access to exciting learning opportunities and enrichment activities. Students in impoverished school districts will get the opposite. With no Regents exam requirement holding anyone accountable, how will we ensure that a history teacher at a tough inner-city school isn’t going to throw his hands up and show his students a movie every day?
For a glimpse of how this will play out, one need only look at the test-optional experiment colleges undertook after the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, the makers of the SAT and ACT college entrance exams urged institutions to adopt a test-optional policy, since the pandemic deprived so many students of the chance to take them. The University of California even declared itself test-blind, meaning that SAT and ACT scores would no longer be considered in its admissions process at all.
Six years later, UC is reconsidering that decision, after an open letter signed by over 3,000 faculty members urged it to reinstate testing requirements. Apparently, ever since the university began relying more on inflated transcript grades and other subjective data for admissions, it has admitted more students who simply couldn’t handle the work. Other colleges have already gone back to requiring the exams.
It’s not too late for New York to reverse course as well.
Nick Buglione, who lives in East Meadow, is a teacher, a freelance journalist and a former editor of the East Meadow Herald.
