New York Made the Regents Exam Optional Without Deciding What Comes Next

New York will no longer require students to pass a Regents exam to graduate. The state's Board of Regents, the body whose namesake exams have anchored a New York diploma for generations, started retiring that requirement in 2024 and spelled out the next phase on June 15.

The timing is awkward. New York City's graduation rate hit an all-time high in 2022, 81.4 percent, even as some schools were reportedly combing through Regents booklets for the extra point or two a student needed to pass, a practice critics call "score scrubbing." Faced with a test that some schools were allegedly gaming, the Board of Regents landed on the cheapest possible fix: stop requiring it.

Officials at the meeting called it the most significant transformation of the state's graduation system in generations. They did not say, yet, what would replace the thing they were removing.

Historic, and Still Undefined#

The program has a name: New York Inspires. It has an origin story going back to 2019, a Blue Ribbon Commission that filed its report in November 2023, and a formal launch announcement in November 2024 built around four "transformations," one of which was always going to be sunsetting the Regents exam as a graduation requirement.

That is a lot of institutional machinery to produce, so far, one sentence of actual content: pass the test or do not, you can still get a diploma.

"The big idea is that New York is moving away from an outdated factory-style education model toward a model system built for how students actually learn," said Jeffrey Matteson, the department's senior deputy commissioner for education policy.

Notice what that sentence does. It describes a feeling about the old system and a feeling about the new one. It does not describe what a student will actually have to do to earn the diploma.

Nobody at the department has said, because nobody has decided yet. Instead of a Regents score, students will show "competency" through some mix of assessments, projects, presentations, and portfolios, a menu with no fixed number of items and no shared recipe. The rubrics meant to define what counts as competent are not due until the 2026-27 school year, a full year after districts are expected to start designing programs around them.

Three Cohorts, Three Different Diplomas#

Cohort by cohort, the timeline breaks down like this. Students who started ninth grade in 2023 finish under the old rules. Students who started in 2024, 2025, or 2026 still sit for Regents exams, but do not need to pass them. Students entering in 2027 and 2028 face a credit requirement the state has not written yet. Students entering in 2029 graduate under a fully new, credit-free system nobody has finished designing either.

That is six graduating classes, each handed a diploma built on a different, partly improvised standard, all stamped with the same seal.

A college admissions officer or an employer looking at that seal has no real way to know what it certifies. Neither will you, the New York parent trying to figure out what your ninth grader's diploma will mean by the time she walks the stage. That uncertainty is the plain, predictable result of retiring the one statewide, externally graded measure before anything was ready to replace it.

Even people inside the reform effort see the gap. Jeff Smink of the advocacy group EdTrust-New York has said the plan only works if the state also strengthens K-8 reading and math instruction, since a student cannot build an impressive internship or capstone portfolio on skills he never mastered. New York Inspires does not currently include a K-8 fix. It includes a promise to write one later.

New York Already Solved This, Thirty Years Ago#

New York has had a working, non-hypothetical, competency-based diploma for almost thirty years, and nobody mentioned it at the June 15 meeting. It just does not run out of Albany.

Since the late 1990s, the New York Performance Standards Consortium has operated 38 public high schools, including Landmark High School in Manhattan, under a state waiver that lets roughly 12,000 students graduate on a portfolio system instead of most Regents exams. Every student writes an analytic literary essay, a social studies research paper, a student-designed science experiment, and a piece of extended mathematical reasoning, then defends each one orally before a panel of teachers and outside evaluators.

Every school in the Consortium grades those tasks against the same rubric. Teachers keep anchor papers, so a passing essay means roughly the same thing in Brooklyn as it does on the Upper West Side. Scores get checked against other teachers' scores, then against an outside reviewer's. And every Consortium student still has to pass one Regents exam, English, as an anchor to the rest of the state.

How do you grade "competency" consistently across hundreds of schools without a standardized test to check it against? The Consortium answered that question before most of this year's incoming ninth graders were born. The state did not need a Blue Ribbon Commission. It needed a subway map.

Why New York Ignored Its Own Best Model#

The incentives explain what the press releases do not. The Consortium model works, but it is expensive in ways a mandate is not: trained teachers, cross-school grading panels, outside evaluators, and years of institutional discipline to keep one school's "passing" from drifting away from another's.

A statewide announcement about "flexibility" and "competency" costs a press conference. Building 700-some districts' worth of Consortium-grade grading infrastructure costs money, time, and the political risk of a rubric some schools fail to clear. Guess which one New York chose to do first.

The fix was always available: give more schools the Consortium's waiver, and pay for the part that makes it work, the teacher training and the cross-school grading panels, instead of promising a statewide version with none of it built. That would cost real budget lines and take longer than a press conference. It would also put the state's name on the results if a rubric failed, instead of leaving each district to absorb that risk on its own.

None of this makes the old system's defenders right, either. A test that some schools were allegedly gaming for a few extra points was never a clean measure of learning. But swapping a gamed exam for an ungraded portfolio does not fix the gaming problem. It just relocates it. A school under pressure to show "evidence of competency" for its graduates has exactly the incentive it always had to be generous with its own students, and soon there will be no state exam left to check its work against.

What a Diploma Is Actually For#

The same pattern shows up well past New York. When a measurement makes an institution look bad, the fix is rarely to close the gap the measurement revealed. It is to change what gets measured. A test with an ugly pass rate becomes optional. The number moves. The underlying question, whether a student actually learned the material, quietly leaves the conversation.

New York's Board of Regents did not lie about any of this. Everything it said on June 15 was true: this is a significant transformation, the old system had real problems, and competency should matter more than seat time. The dishonesty, if there is any, is in the omission. A state that had spent seven years and a Blue Ribbon Commission looking for a better way to certify what a graduate knows already had one, in continuous operation, 12,000 students strong, the entire time.

For now, the only New York students who can tell you exactly what their diploma means are the ones in a 38-school program the state's own announcement never got around to naming.