The problem: Schools aren’t prepared to replace the flawed test with a rigorous, meaningful alternative.
The Board of Regents voted at its September meeting to move ahead with ending the requirement that students pass Regents exams to earn a diploma. The rules take effect next school year, which means the first students affected are already in high school. Advocates and elected officials immediately raised the question: If students no longer have to pass the same exams, what keeps schools from lowering standards?
I strongly believe the Regents made the right call. New York is catching up with a long national shift away from making standardized exit exams the gatekeeper for a diploma. Only six states still require students to pass such an exam, and their educational performance is all over the map. But the critics are right in one respect: The state Education Department has not yet built or described the system that will take the exams’ place, and that’s a hole that must be filled quickly.
The Regents are statewide exams that New York has been requiring since 1878. They are written by the state Education Department, and students take them at the end of high school courses in subjects including English, math, science and social studies. Under the current system, students must pass five Regents exams or approved alternatives like AP tests in order to graduate.
Much of the anxiety here is about grades, and whether a transcript describing in-class performance can be trusted without an exam that validates the difficulty of the coursework. Grade inflation is real, and an A in one school may represent very different work from an A in another. But that does not mean a standardized test is our best measure of whether a student is ready for what comes next. Researchers at the University of Chicago tracked more than 55,000 public school graduates into four-year colleges and found that high school grades predicted college graduation far more accurately than ACT scores, and did so consistently regardless of which high school a student attended. The lesson here is that sustained work over time can tell us things about students that a single exam cannot.
New York’s own research also raised questions about what passing the Regents actually tells us. In 2010, after examining how Regents scores related to performance in college, the state established college-readiness benchmarks of 75 in English and 80 in math, well above the passing score of 65. To this day a student can meet the requirements for a Regents diploma without meeting the state’s own benchmarks for college readiness.
I understand the appeal of a common test. I spent years as a high school principal and later as a deputy chancellor in New York City. A statewide exam makes a promise that anyone can understand. A student in Buffalo and a student in Brooklyn have to clear the same bar.
But rigor is not just a matter of how much material students cover. It depends on the habits of mind they develop as they learn it. A 10th-grader preparing for the global history Regents, for example, is responsible for the history of the world from 1750 to the present. When teachers know students may be tested on material from across that enormous span, they have little choice but to move through the content rapidly. There is no time to study any topic deeply. A class can’t stay with the Haitian Revolution long enough to ask how the French Revolution helped set it in motion, or how a successful revolt by enslaved people in Haiti led to repressive policies against Black people in the United States. Following connections like these, weighing competing explanations and using evidence to build an argument are how students learn to think like historians.
When graduation depends on passing exams, schools have a powerful incentive to concentrate on the specific material and question types that appear on the test. Teachers have less room to innovate, personalize instruction or connect learning to the real world. College requires something different. Students have to make sense of unfamiliar material and apply what they know to new contexts. Preparing students to pass the Regents leaves too little room to develop those capacities.
The exams also make it harder to integrate academics with the career pathways that give many students a reason to be in school. A young person in a health sciences or construction trades program should be learning chemistry or geometry through the problems that arise in that work. But when graduation also depends on covering a separate body of material for a Regents exam, schools often have to protect time for test preparation rather than build the academic course around those applied experiences.
Richard Elmore, who spent his career studying school improvement, argued that if you want to know what students are actually learning, look at the work they are being asked to do in class. A curriculum may promise critical thinking, but if the assignment asks students only to recall facts or follow a familiar procedure, that is the lower-level thinking students will master. That is why the Regents debate is ultimately about more than the exams students take. It is about the work they will encounter in their classes every day.
A young man named Jameel's experience offers a glimpse of another approach. He is a student at Urban Academy, a pioneering public high school in Manhattan that takes in young people who have fallen behind on credits or dropped out of school altogether. His science graduation assessment grew out of a question he developed in a class on the physics of sound: Does pitch affect how loud people think a sound is? He spent close to a year on it, playing people notes at different pitches and writing up what he found. Then he had to sit in front of a panel of teachers and defend his conclusions.
The teachers pressed him. Did he really understand the logarithmic scale used to measure decibels? Had his experiment isolated the variable he claimed to be testing? One of them spotted an ambiguity in the way he had collected his data and made him explain exactly what he had told his research subjects. Jameel answered some of the questions confidently. Others sent him back through his own methods to work out what he would do differently. Then he left the room while the panel scored his work against a common rubric and decided whether he had shown enough understanding to pass. That kind of defense, and the iterative work behind it, matters even more now that students can use AI to produce polished work without doing the thinking themselves.
Urban Academy is one of 38 schools in the New York Performance Standards Consortium. Together, these schools have spent decades developing a curriculum and assessment system that is both engaging and rigorous, with graduation based on sustained evidence of what students know and can do rather than a single exit exam. The defense is only the visible part. Teachers across schools use common scoring guides, examine students’ work together, compare their judgments and work through disagreements about what should pass. Outside evaluators bring another set of eyes to the work. Over time, teachers develop a shared understanding of what good work looks like.
CUNY has put the system to the test. Since 2015, it has admitted to its four-year colleges Consortium graduates who fell below the SAT cutoff, judging them instead on their grades and a scored performance assessment paper. Researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center followed them and found that they earned higher first-semester grades than classmates with better test scores, finished more of the credits they attempted, and came back for a second year at a higher rate.
Scaling up this kind of approach will take some effort. State officials have acknowledged that there is no definition yet of what a demanding local assessment should look like, no shared examples of student work, and no way to check that a diploma in one district means what it means in another. So this is not plug-and-play, but it’s urgent that we start the process now.
The work ahead is substantial. Teachers need help designing demanding assignments, common scoring guides and examples of student work, and regular time to compare judgments with colleagues from other schools. The only way the assignments and rubrics will have rigor is if teachers see what quality work looks like across schools and districts.
New York does not have to build that capacity from scratch. The Performance Standards Consortium has decades of experience with performance assessment, Internationals Network for Public Schools has adapted it for multilingual learners, and the state’s own PLAN pilot has begun bringing this work to Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), regional agencies that help school districts share resources and provide professional training for teachers.
The state should build on that expertise and use the BOCES as the regional infrastructure for moderation studies and ongoing teacher learning. New York City should move quickly as well, opening experienced schools to teachers and principals who need to see what this work looks like in practice. The governor and State Legislature should fund the time, coaching and outside support required to sustain that work over several years.
As the Regents requirement recedes, time now devoted to test prep should shift toward designing, reviewing and calibrating richer student assignments. But schools should not all be expected to make a transition next year. Let the schools and districts that are ready go first and give everyone else more time.
Jameel had come from a more test-focused school. “I didn’t care about what I was learning,” he said. “I cared about getting a high score on a test.” Given a question of his own, he found something else: “I would have never learned that I could put so much of myself into a scientific lab report if I did not get the chance to do this type of performance-based assessment.” New York has opened the door to this kind of learning. Now it must give teachers the support to make work as demanding as Jameel’s possible in every high school.
