Friday, January 30, 2009

A Student's Perspective Of Math B Regents


A former student e-mailed me asking for his regents grade. He is a very bright boy, did exceptionally well in my class and was extremely worried. I sent him his mark and told him to write to Albany and tell them what an unfair exam it was. I even sent him a copy of the letter I sent. Here is his response. The thing that struck me the most in his letter was that he felt all the studying he did was a waste of time. Since this regents was so different,doing the old ones did not help.


Wow, that's a real good letter, i really hope they take it into consideration. I was looking at all the question you mentioned, and i looked them up in the Math B January 2009 Regents and key online, and everything you said was true about them. Also about raising the raw passing score was the first thing i went to look for and i couldn't believe they raised it to 49, that's when i started worrying about myself passing. I hope they do take in consideration for these questions and give everyone the benefit of the doubt and give the full credit for those questions. Yea, also i was telling Daniel that i felt doing the old regents was kind of a waste of time since it didn't really help much on the actual regents. So this letter is also exactly how the students felt, hopefully all the complaints they are getting will persuade hem to fix something. It didn't surprise me that you would appeal, your one of the few dedicated teachers n the school, glad i had you as a teacher last year.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To give you another students point of view, I can tell you that the regent wasn't that far off from the math B curriculum. I took January's regent and most of the questions are based off of interpretation of learned concepts, and the ability to apply them. There were some topics which will confused me for a while, but if you think through it rationally one could get through it. In this exam the calculator was the best tool that I was given. Honestly I think that if one took their time and went through each step logically one would get the right answer.

Anonymous said...

yeah don't you hate it when you actually need to know the material? XD