State Education Department

Oversight of Scoring Practices on Regents Examinations

Regents examinations are statewide tests for high school students in particular subject areas. Local school officials are responsible for scoring the exams and reporting the results to the State Education Department (SED). SED provides detailed scoring guidelines for the questions requiring judgment and reviews selected scored exams to evaluate the schools’ compliance with the guidelines. These reviews have identified significant inaccuracies that have tended to inflate exam scores across the State. However, we found SED had done little to correct these inappropriate scoring practices. We further found that when schools did not comply with SED’s request to send in their exams for scoring review, SED was not following up with the schools to obtain the exams. We recommended that certain actions be taken by SED to strengthen its oversight of local scoring practices for Regents exams.

For a complete copy of Report 2008-S-151 click here.
For a copy of the associated follow-up report click here.