Scores from the faulty June administration of the the New York Regents exam Math A section were discarded because the test form was too hard, and this is causing untold headaches for NY's students. This description of the resulting chaos in the Kingston school district is but one example:
For seniors who took the exam, the remedy...is clear: If the student passed the Math A course, that student may substitute the course grade for the exam and then graduate. A total of 22 Kingston High School seniors took the Math A exam. According to [Kingston Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum Grere] Fischer, two seniors passed the exam and 18 will graduate today based on their passing course grade...
But how this will affect the grades of freshman, sophomores and juniors is not yet clear...[state Education Commissioner Richard] Mills originally said that juniors could substitute their course grades for the test as well, but recent communications to school districts stated that the state may re-score the exams...
For freshman and sophomores it gets a little more complicated...a sophomore can take the Math A exam at the next opportunity, which means that a sophomore who might be continuing with Math B this upcoming year may have to take the Math A exam in January after a whole semester away from the material...four years of a certain exam are developed at the same time. There could be three more years of faulty Math A exams to come...
Fischer said that the Math A fiasco could have also affected students grades on other standardized tests that week. She said that many teachers reported students crying in the middle of taking other exams after finding out that they "bombed" Math A.
Bas Braams has examined previous Math sections of the Regents exams and found them to be lacking in quality as well. If he is correct in his statement (stated in a previous comment on this page) that the test designers "clearly do not have an adequate background in mathematics, or even in precise and clear use of language," the future of the Regents Math exam is starting to appear rather bleak.