The purpose of this memorandum is to provide information about a revision in the design of the Regents Examination in Geometry that will take effect beginning with the January 2018 administration.

Regents Examination in Geometry Test Design

Regents Examinations are developed with the participation of hundreds of NYS educators. All test questions are created, reviewed, revised, and selected by educators and are field-tested with a representative group of NYS students before appearing on an operational test. Educator feedback from each test administration is collected on online teacher evaluation forms and analyzed by the Office of State Assessment and is used to make refinements to future tests.

As a result of feedback received from NYS educators, the Regents Examination in Geometry will be reduced by one 6-credit question beginning with the January 2018 administration. This reduction is intended to help students attend to the questions on the test at a pace that is optimum for them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills of the Geometry Standards and have sufficient time to complete the test. The revised test design is shown below.

Regents Examination in Geometry Revised Test Design

Although there will be one less test question, the overall test blueprint will not change. That is, the content emphases will remain the same as in prior administrations of this test (see the Revised Test Guide for more information). The 6-credit question that is retained in this revised test design will require students to develop multistep, extended logical arguments and proofs involving major content. Although the 6-credit question that required students to use modeling to solve real-world problems is being eliminated, this content will be assessed in other components of the test, including the 4-credit questions.

Because the new test design has fewer credits than the prior design, the conversion charts will take this reduction into account when providing the raw credit to scale score conversion. The passing standard will be aligned with the recommendations of the educator panel that convened in June 2015, when the test was first administered. Additionally, the scaled cut scores associated with Levels 2, 3, and 5 (55, 65, and 85, respectively) will not change. Because the cut score for Level 4 was not mathematically fixed, the scale score range associated with this level may change. As in the past, the scale scores and corresponding performance levels will be included on the conversion chart that is provided with the scoring materials for each administration.

For questions concerning the Regents Examinations, please email the Office of State Assessment or call 518-474-5902.