Costs to Regents Exam Costly to Students
By: Kimberly Roman
Earlier this year, Hostos-Lincoln academy student Maleeha Assad was scheduled to take the June Trigonometry Regents. Unfortunately, on the day for the test she had woken up extremely sick and couldn't make it.
"I didn't stress it," she said. "I was just expecting to postpone it 'til August. Problem solved." Whenever anyone questioned her on her absence she just simply answered that she will take it in August. One of the many people who question her was her, guidance counselor, Daniel Jackson. "Mr. Jackson was getting ready to [reprimand] me about my absence, so I stopped him before he even started and told him I'm going to take it in August. His face changed from mad to like he felt sorry. Then he dropped the bomb." He told her that there is no August Trigonometry Regent and there are no January Regents at all, so instead Assad will have to wait a whole year.
The New York Board of Regents recently announced numerous changes because of a 8 million dollar budget cut .The new Regent changes include no more chemistry or trigonometry state standardized tests in August and no more Regents being held in January.
Many students like Maleeha Assad will be greatly affected. "I felt so stupid and I cried like always," she said. "I was gonna have to retake a class I got an 80 in, and since I had to take that class I wasn't going to be able to take a geometry class to get a higher grade on my Regents, so I can't get my Advanced Regent's Diploma."
This is a problem that 50-year-old Vincent Marano, vice principal of Hostos-Lincoln Academy, already predicted. "Students who want an Advanced Regents Diploma won't get it because certain Regents will not be given this summer," he explained in an e-mail. "Without the January Regents, students who do not pass in summer school will have to wait a whole year to graduate.
Not only will those Regents' changes be put in effect, but foreign language Regents in total will be cancelled. Alumni of Hostos-Lincoln Academy, Hector Rodriguez, who graduated in 2011 with his advance regent diploma thanks to the January Regents, argues that "they shouldn't take it off, because it's better to be bilingual in this kind of day. It will be better for the actual student if they knew another language and they can prove they know that language well enough."
Some may see that this was a mistake, but according to Vincent Marano, it's not. "All the departments had to share the pain of budget cuts and this is the way to satisfy the political needs of the New York State Education Department," he said. "I think they did buy essential exams and since the Regents Diploma is the key one, everything else was seen as not essential," Marano said. He added that "they could have combined the Social Studies exam or done away with Global Studies and they could mandate two math Regents instead of three for the advanced exam."
There will be compensation to the language test, according to Marano. Each school would make its own exams for the language requirement. But many areas might not mandate the exams if they don't have the staff and funds to create and administer the exam.
Daniel Jackson realizes the tough spot students have been put into because of these changes. "The only people genuinely negatively affected are the students themselves," Jackson said.
