By SAM DILLON
New York Times
June 25, 2003

Moving to defuse a crisis for thousands of high school students, New York State's education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, yesterday set aside the results of last week's Math A Regents exam for seniors and juniors. The test is required for graduation, and many educators had described it as inordinately difficult.

Mr. Mills's decision, which came after four days of rising clamor from principals, parents, lawmakers and members of the Board of Regents, allows local school authorities across New York to issue diplomas to seniors who failed the test but passed their math courses, and to certify that juniors who failed have passed the math graduation requirements. Sophomores and freshmen who failed may have to retake the test, although their scores may be adjusted upward after authorities complete an investigation.

Mr. Mills acknowledged that the test was technically flawed, but declined to say whether its defect lay in the phrasing of its questions, the level at which its passing score was set, or in some other feature.

"I think we made some mistakes with this exam, and it's up to us to identify and correct them," Mr. Mills said. Early results of a survey by the State Department of Education showed that only about 37 percent of the students who took the test on June 17 scored at or above the passing level of 55, compared with 61 percent in June 2002.

Educators said it was the first time that test results had been scrapped since the commissioner and the Board of Regents in 1996 began converting the Regents tests from a battery of optional tests taken to achieve higher honors into graduation requirements for all New York students.

Mr. Mills's predecessor, Thomas Sobol, could recall only one time in the 80-year history of Regents testing that results had been set aside - and that was when a newspaper published a stolen answer sheet before the test was given. One State Education Department official, however, said he believed other results might have been set aside.

Mr. Mills made his decision in close consultation with Robert M. Bennett, the retired president of the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, who is chancellor of the Board of Regents. Mr. Bennett said that all 16 members of the board had come to consensus in a series of phone calls on Sunday and Monday on the need to set aside the results.

"This was a moment of embarrassment," Mr. Bennett said. "We heard big-time from parents, who got very upset about their kids' education, which I think is a good thing - so lesson learned, but more to come. We're not finished with this."

Mr. Mills said he was appointing an independent panel of mathematicians and others to review what went wrong. In the meantime, he also announced the suspension of the next administration of the Math A Regents, scheduled for August, to give testing experts time to rectify problems identified by the panel.

The emergency decision came just in time for thousands of seniors who had failed the exam, because graduation ceremonies are scheduled for this week at many of the state's 1,000 high schools. Since passing the exam was a prerequisite for graduation, many schools had to consider whether to allow those who had failed to participate in the ceremonies.

On the test, students were given three hours to answer 335 questions, which ranged across concepts of algebra, geometry, probability and statistics. The test is intended to be administered to students at the end of their sophomore year, but advanced students can elect to take it as freshmen, and students who have failed it can try repeatedly to pass it.

One of Mr. Mills's deputy commissioners, James A. Kadamus, said that the results of a preliminary survey conducted in recent days had provided data that resists any quick diagnosis of the test's basic problem, especially since students seem to have performed at different proficiencies depending on their grade levels. In the sample results gathered in the survey, 30 percent of the seniors had passed the test, compared with 27 percent of juniors, 48 percent of sophomores and 81 percent of freshmen, Mr. Kadamus said.

One interpretation of this data was that the freshmen and sophomores who took the test were generally stronger math performers, while the juniors and seniors were students who struggle, Mr. Kadamus said.

A significant percentage of students appear to have simply given up after struggling with about half the test. "One possibility we're looking at is that there was something about the accumulation of questions which caused greater difficulty than the individual questions," Mr. Kadamus said. "The whole was greater than the sum of the parts. So it looks like there was a discouragement factor."

One student who experienced that discouragement was Joey Morgan, a sophomore at Putnam Valley High School in Putnam County, who took the test for the fourth time on June 17. "Parts 1 and 2 were fair, but on Parts 3 and 4 it was like - Whoa! I've never seen anything like this," Mr. Morgan said, adding that he believed he had failed, but had not been officially notified.

Not all students failed the test. At the Benjamin Banneker Academy in Brooklyn, a dozen seniors who needed to pass the test to graduate attended after-school and Saturday morning tutoring sessions all spring - and all 12 passed the test, Daryl Rock, the school's principal said.

"When I was taking the exam, I kept saying to myself, `Oh my God, this is too hard,' " said Kimberly Boone, an 18-year-old senior, who had failed the test three times.

She earned a 73 on the test, the highest in her class at Banneker. "Tears came to my eyes I was so happy," she said.

Mr. Mills's decision brought praise from some education officials.

"The commissioner believes in standards to his core - he is Mr. Standards - and he saw that this was a flawed test and rather than making excuses he took quick, decisive action," said Randi Weingarten, president of the city teachers' union. "I give him a lot of credit for that."

Steven Sanders, the chairman of the Education Committee in the State Assembly, who has been critical of the decision to transform the Regents tests into a graduation requirement, congratulated Mr. Mills for his decision, but added: "This is an opportunity to now revisit and reconsider the policy of high-stakes, do-or-die exams. Exclusive reliance on any particular exam on any given day is an inherently flawed process."

But Joel I. Klein, the New York City chancellor, who said he called yesterday to congratulate Mr. Mills, argued that the debacle on the Math A test should not be interpreted as a blow to the standards movement. "This is not to eliminate testing," Mr. Klein said. "This is to eliminate a test that was way out of line."

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