By Kevin McLaughlin
With snow melting and temperatures slowly increasing, Spring is right around the corner for the state of New York. With Spring comes the excitement of summertime, as well as the stress of end of the year tests.
The AP and Regents exams are standardized tests that high school students across the state and country take every year, but with the outbreak of COVID-19 last year, students took AP exams online, while the Regents were simply cancelled.
However, the Biden administration announced recently that they intend on asking states to administer standardized testing at the end of the school year. They did not indicate whether these tests would be online or in person.
According to The Journal News, at the upcoming New York Board of Regents meeting on March 15, officials will propose cancelling six regents for June: Algebra II, Geometry, Global History and Geography, United States History and Government, Chemistry, and Physics. Meaning that four Regents will remain: Algebra I, English Language Arts, Living Environment, and Earth Science. These four tests will still be given because they fulfill a federal requirement to test high school students at least once in ELA, Math, and Science.
As of right now, the AP exams will be a mix of online and in person, depending on the subject and your school district’s situation. However, this still has the possibility to change, as the testing does not begin until the beginning of May.
The New York State of Education Department continues to state that preparing for and taking standardized tests is not the best use of time in the 2020-21 school year, reiterating that tests cannot be “safely, equitably, and fairly administered to all students.”
We should get more information on this topic after the March 15th meeting, but until then teachers will continue to prepare for Regents and AP exams later in the year.
