What You Should Do If You Failed the Regents
If you are capable of doing well on the Regents but failed for lack of studying, you dropped the ball. Because of their timing and structure, Regents exams are the easiest standardized tests you’re scheduled to encounter. You can retake the Regents in August. Confirm with your guidance counselor which test you are registered to retake.
Ask yourself this question: if studying the Regents curriculum over the course of 10 months with your teacher resulted in you getting less than 65% on the test, how can you do well with less than two months before the August retake without your teacher? It is possible—I’ve seen it personally while guiding students through this period—but it’s not easy.
You should start studying for the August retake as soon as you get your June test results back. As you know, these tests are cumulative and cover a wide breadth of material that you are going to want to study over time to improve your information retention as well as your retake score. Besides memorizing the information and methods for answering questions, you’ll also want to learn to apply test taking strategies specific to your Regents. Now that school is out, you don’t have the benefit of your teacher’s lessons or being able to ask your teacher questions that come up while you study. Now, a good portion of my students every year criticize their teacher’s ability to to do their job. They say their teacher never wanted to be a teacher; they say he’s lazy; they say she doesn’t answer our questions; her tests are way harder than what’s taught in class; there’s no textbook or resource for more practice questions. While some of my students’ criticism is true, you should never passively rely on your teacher to learn what you need to know to do well on the Regents. The idea that you’ll just show up to class, lean back in your little school chair and be taught everything you need to know to succeed on the a standardized test is a farce. Passively watching someone answer questions in front of you will maybe get you 20% of the way there. To learn, you need to actively study. That means more than the basic taking notes and doing homework. Find practice problems; try to solve them on your own. Study an example problem to learn how to solve it faster. Try harder questions. Then watch a video on how to solve the ones you get wrong. Pause the video when the question is introduced, and try it by yourself first. Bring specific questions to your teacher when she’s free. That’s how you do well in class, and eventually, on tests. You need to recreate this on your own over the summer in the lead up to the August retake.
You can get limited guidance from a review book. I used the Barron’s blue and red books when I was a high school student. The only issue with those is that they are pretty basic black-and-white books with only a few sentences to explain every practice question. So it’s really only helpful for course topics that you already know well. To address this, I made self-paced Regents prep courses with visually stimulating video explanations for every practice problem. Each video shows step-by-step answers to questions the faster test-taking way, and the way your teacher would want you to do it if you had to show your work.
The basic blueprint you should use to succeed on any standardized test is as follows:
(1) Take a practice test as a diagnostic to see which questions and units you need to study the most.
(2) Learn the strategies for how to answer those missed questions.
(3) Apply these strategies to the questions you missed as well as similar ones.
(4) Repeat—reducing the number of missed questions each cycle.
Honesty
Unless there was some extenuating circumstance, you wasted an opportunity by failing the Regents in June. Your score will show up on your transcript. The best thing you can do at this point is have the intention to right a wrong by applying the above blueprint to the next month-and-a-half and earn a strong score in August. Strong enough to eclipse the June one.
