The Exam

12:45pm
The June 20th, 2001 administration of the New York State Regents Examination in Physics is about to commence and the tension in the air is palpable.  The first of several students cleverly finding ways to defy the 1:00pm admittance time have started to filter upstairs to ask me nervous questions about the impending subject to be tested.  The annual administration of the test has all the anticipation and drama if not the spite of a lethal injection.  Questions at this stage of the game are mundane and more often than not the answers are already known. 

“Mr. – What are the units of work?” 

“You know that,” I prodded gently.  “What do you think?” 

“Uh.... oh yeah... Joules.”

There is little to do at this point but last minute hand holding and gentle assuring that everything will be ok.  For most it is OK, but never for all, and everyone is afraid to be one of the 10% - 20% for whom the axe falls.  A failure on this exam almost inevitably leads to a failure in the class and ineligibility for a prestigious Regents Diploma.  

1:00pm 
The kids are now officially allowed into the building and proctors are supposed to be traveling from the main office to their rooms where they will administer the exam.  The Byzantine and sometimes frankly bizarre life of The Regents Exams starts somewhere under the close auspices of the state of New York.  The day before the assigned time for the exam the tests are transported in locked safe boxes by courier to the school where they are carefully placed into a locked vault.  If a school doesn’t have a vault, they must use another school for a storage place.  There is only one key to the locked box and this key will be used less than half an hour before the exam.  The exams are then unloaded and dolled out to the proctors.  At our school, each student who is eligible to take the exam has been given a ‘Regents Card’ with an assigned room number and seat number and a unique Regents Number for us to match to their name.  Unfortunately, for one reason or another, some kids are always left off and must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis the day of the exam. 

The Proctors get to the rooms at about the same time that the first wave of kids begins to fall against the walls.  Acoustics were never a strong point of NYC school design (neither was architecture for that matter) and the overlapping echoes of hundreds of students entering the hallways and trying to find out where to go more or less simultaneously does little to relieve any anxiety about the situation. 

1:05pm 
In addition to the Exam itself, each proctor should have been given a list of all students who should be in their room, an instruction sheet for administering the exam, enough reference tables for everyone, and plenty of scrap paper.  As the teacher in charge of teaching the subject (and therefore barred from proctoring the exam) it falls to me and my colleague to distribute the other lifesaving Regents materials:  pencils, protractors, and all important calculators to those students who need them.  These crutches are for the most part symbolic.  Maria, a girl in my 6th period class comes running up to me. 

“Mr. Stein!  They said I could have a graphing calculator and they gave me this one instead!” 

All students who had borrowed calculators from the school (which was just about all of them) had to return said calculators a week before.  Having a calculator that one is familiar with is every bit as essential to these students as a thumb is to a baby. 

“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.  I’ll get you one in a minute.  Just sit down and get ready to start the test.” 

I push my cart of supplies off down the hallway.  I have bigger problems.  I have successfully intercepted 3 of the 6 known students who didn’t have cards.  I also had in my possession 4 Regents cards of students who had skipped the last week of class (all seniors) and failed to pick them up.  As if this weren’t enough, I had just been approached by a final anomaly.  Giselle, a student in my honors class had become noticeably pregnant by the end of the year and had just asked me where to go.  Not only did she not have a card, she wasn’t on the list either, which was incorrect because I was certain she was eligible.  When this happens, the only thing to do is to clear it with the supervisor and stick her into the first available room. 

1:10pm
Giselle is tucked safely away in room 301, and I’m returning to get Maria her calculator when I’m intercepted by an aide from the office. 

“Those kids who weren’t on the list – we found out why – they’re ESL (English as a Second Language) – and entitled to extra time and a dictionary if they want.” 

I’ve known these kids all year and this was the first I had heard about this – I’d thought they were just quiet.  But again, immediately, a more pressing problem presents itself.  Since the initial allotment of exams to the proctors had been done based on initial student counts in the rooms, any room with a bilingual student wasn’t going to have enough tests or reference tables.  Finding a few extras is not an easy task and essentially involves redistributing from those classrooms with one or two extras to those with a one or two test deficit, all while projecting an air of calm reassurance while navigating throngs of teaming kids trying to find their room, sharpen pencils, and wish their friends luck.

1:15pm
All systems go, the test is beginning, proctors are reading the starting instructions, everyone has enough tests and reference tables though protractors are in very short supply (we only had about 120 for 200 kids so we relied on many of the kids to bring their own.)  I remember Giselle and go back to the room to discover that she has already been given a graphing calculator by someone.  Since everything seems, for the moment, to be running smoothly and it is becoming quiet enough for me to think again in the hallway, I decide to take a quick inventory.  I still have 4 Regents cards in my pocket and I note with dread the fact that there are still some spaces in classrooms that should be full.

1:20pm
A quick poll of the proctors reveals that some students are missing.  Meanwhile, latecomers are filtering in slowly.  I note five students in particular, José, Giselle, Rafael, Sergio and Evonne, are absent.  Plus, I still have 3 Regents cards to pass out.  Unfortunately, in the process of getting a Regents off the ground, it's all too likely that one of these students somehow found the right room and started taking the test without a card, or even worse – the wrong room.  I decide to put them on the back burner and concentrate on the five I know are missing. 

In desperation, I turn to the telephone.  My first call – to Sergio’s home phone number gets a parent who assures me that Sergio came to school today and that he must be here somewhere.  A second call to José’s number reveals that José ‘no longer lives’ at this address.  He’s moved in with his grandmother, and the person on the line really couldn’t be held responsible for his whereabouts.  The ‘helpful’ person who is identified as José’s stepfather doesn’t know the new number but he does know the address.  Lot of good that does me.  Next I call Giselle.  This time I hit pay dirt.  A cowed voice answers, recognizes me immediately, and apologizes for not being there.  Apparently, she had managed to sprain her ankle that morning and couldn’t walk on it. 

“Can’t I just take it tomorrow?”  She whines.  

“No,” I inform her curtly, “The Regents are only given on certain days.  I strongly recommend you go outside, find a taxi, and get to school!”

“But I live in the Bronx!  It will take me at least an hour to get there! And I can’t afford $40 for a Taxi!” 

“You have one hour to get here and take the test or its all over.”  I tell her in a voice exhibiting as little panic as I can muster.  Technically, students can take the test if they arrive up to an hour late.  After that, other students are allowed to leave the test room so no one else is admitted.

1:25pm 
I hadn’t expected Rafael to come anyway and he hadn’t come to class for at least a month, so the fact that I didn’t have a home phone number for him came as no surprise.  Evonne was in the same category, but with a longer past.  She came to my class highly recommended and recognized as an achiever.  She had ambitions to go to Cornell.  No one knows what happened to trigger the fall, but by the middle of the year she had left home, moved in with her boyfriend, and started a promising career at Hooters – with ambitions to be a stripper.  She told me middle of the year that she didn’t care about school anymore and that she was going to cut the last month of my class – which she did.  She maintained up to the end, however, that she would take the Regents – a lie that I never believed.  I had no phone number on file for her and, like Rafael, she wasn’t really ready for the test anyway, so I opted to concentrate on the three students who, in my estimation, had a shot at passing.  José was very bright, and though his attendance was sporadic, he had never failed even a single test he had taken.  Sergio was in my honors class and also passed pretty much everything.  Giselle was in transit – I hoped – and there was nothing I could do for her, but maybe, just maybe, I could find Sergio or José.

1:30pm
The new address that José’s step father had given me was in the same neighborhood as the school.  I made a cursory inspection of the test rooms to make sure that José wasn’t somehow in the wrong one, then I charged down the steps with every intention of going to his home to ring the door bell.  For better or worse, I ran into Omran on the steps.  Omran was in my AP Physics class last year and he was waiting for his girlfriend to finish taking the test.  He also owed me.  Omran swore up and down that he had seen José in school that day.  Omran even took me to where some of his friends were hanging out and they verified his presence in the building.  I did a complete circuit of every area in the building I knew, but no José.  Finally, I simply gave Omran the address and offered him a bounty – $5 – to bring in José. 

1:45pm
As Omran goes running down the steps to check the handball courts adjacent to the school for my wayward José, Sergio comes up the steps at a trot with an entirely unapologetic smile.  One down at least.

1:50pm
I finally get a rest.  Somewhere in the last hour of near panic a blood vessel in my eye has decided to give a violent outward expression of the tension everyone had been feeling.  After treating the large red spot in my already blood shot eye with eye drops, I take a breather. 

2:14pm
With literally seconds to go, Giselle limps down the hallway and refuses my offer to reimburse her $20 for the cab ride.  She takes her place in the room without incident, and I breathe a little easier.

2:15pm 
The cutoff, now even if Omran did return with José he wouldn’t be allowed to take the test.  Omran would later find that the address was incorrect and that no one could find him or even the number of his cell phone.  I still don’t know what happened to José – rumor is he failed English and so was denied graduation anyway.  I gave Omran many thanks and a honey stick as compensation for his effort.  Now at long last I sit down, pop on some headphones, and start to take the test myself. 

3:00pm 
I finish Part I of the three part exam.  It would probably take me a solid 15 minutes to finish the other two parts.  As a general rule, it should take the students about three times as long to finish a test as it takes me.  About this time, the first students start to leave. You do the math; this is not a good thing.  I go out to the hallway to stop the hemorrhaging.  It's a touchy business.  I get all sorts of responses to the suggestion that maybe they should use their time a little more wisely. “But I already checked all my answers!” “But I don’t know anything else!”  “But I don’t want to!” 

Not that I blame them, circulation is not a strong point of most of the rooms, and the bright sunny humid day outside has nicely hit 88° while 34 tightly packed bodies inside has made it feel somewhat worse than that.  Still, it's interesting to note the number of students who are utterly convinced that even with another hour of hard thought there isn’t a single extra problem they could get right.  Or maybe after hours of test taking in hot rooms (nearly half of my students had already taken a three hour math test this morning), they had simply reached the point of diminishing returns and succumbed to despair.  A disproportionate number of my failures come from this early group leaving.  Some few of them are convinced to get a drink at the water fountain and go back to the room to continue work.  Many are simply resigned.  Right before 4:00pm both Sergio and Giselle leave with purposeful strides (or limps in Giselle’s case) but not exactly confidence-inspiring wry grins.  Both should have passed with flying colors.  In the end, neither of them mustered the 65 points needed to pass.

4:00pm
All of the rooms are still at least half full with less than 15 minutes left.  This year, as every year, the kids leave the test with stunned looks on their faces.  “This test was harder than last years’!”  Even ‘A’ students are uncertain.  Experience teaches me that the surest sign of trouble is confidence as a kid leaves the test.  Many kids have been practicing for this test for months.  But then again, what can you really do to prepare yourself to take a test like this?  Lock yourself in your apartment with the heater stuck on high for three hours while you run through 80 odd physics problems?  And remember to do 3 hours of math homework first.  Can we really expect everyone to perform to their maximum potential under these circumstances?  What is maximum potential?

4:15pm 
The test ends now.  This is broadly interpreted.  Many proctors give the students a few extra minutes based on the order in which they received their tests, or give them time to copy answers down onto scantrons out of deference to the graders.  Other proctors abide strictly by their contract, which says they must work until 4:15.  This means that they must be out of the room by 4:15, which entails collecting tests 5 minutes early, often ripping exam sheets and sweaty pencils away from shaken students.  I witnessed Marcos carefully and meticulously work though the first 2 parts of the exam.  Five minutes before the end Marcos began part III.  More or less simultaneously his proctor, a huge white authoritarian gym teacher announced that he was going to start collecting tests setting off a flurry of activity as fearful, or forlorn students struggled to avoid his ire.  I watched painfully for the next five minutes as Marcos failed to collect himself enough to work the problems that would save him.  Worrying more about the impending deadline of the proctor than the problems, he didn’t manage to answer any questions in those last five minutes.  He failed the exam – with a 63. 

4:30pm 
By now all the regular exam rooms have been closed, and the extra time students have been safely tucked away in their room for another hour and a half of effort.  The proctors have returned the completed exams to the science office and the physics teachers, both of us, have been handed the box full of various assorted Regents parts. 

The first order of business is to sort the exams into piles and make sure they are all there.  Each exam should have at least a scantron and an answer sheet for long answer part III.  There should also be exam books full of questions and scrap paper, but we concern ourselves initially only with what we are supposed to grade.  After the first pass, there are already two problems.  Orlando is missing his part III answer sheet and Luis has a blank scantron and is missing part III.  Putting aside these aberrant exams for later, we start in on the bulk of the remaining.  Scanning the first two parts of the exam takes all of about an hour. 

At the end of this time, about half of the students have passed.  These are the good students, the honors students, and generally, the ones I wasn’t worried about.  All of them have their own stories, which I will not relay here.  Of the remaining half, all but one or two had at least a shot at passing, meaning they had a combined part I and part II score of at least 50.  Part III was worth 15 points so anyone with less than 50 after part II was already doomed.

6:30pm
With half of my students firmly in the undecided category, I started grading the part III’s of only those students.  By the end of the whole process of course, everyone’s part III’s would be graded and initialed by at least two different physics teachers, but it isn’t the predictable students that keep you up at night, so with several good working hours left, I set out to put my mind at ease as much as possible.

9:00pm
All of my marginal part III’s having been graded at least once, and it's time to tally the scores.  Now a Regents becomes something of a spectator sport.  There is cheering as a student passes, sighs of discouragement when a student fails and above all, anticipation when a student, despite ones best grading efforts, remains borderline.  At this point, the story evolves into a series of epic personal battles.   Individual students struggling with a test, and me and the other physics teacher struggling to recreate, as much as possible, the nature of the battle they have just finished.  Sometimes, the steps are straightforward, and sometimes we are left to infer logical leaps we can only hope the student intended.  Each student is different, and even in a standardized test, their individuality comes through. 

Giselle and Maria also fail to make the grade.  Giselle has been missing lots of class due to her pregnancy.  Maria was flaky at times throughout the year, but has turned it around and been studying consistently for the last month, and her failure takes me profoundly by surprise.  She is one of my most disappointing losses, not because she is brilliant (she isn’t), or because she’s a dedicated student (except for the last month she isn’t that either) but because she is one of the most joyfully energetic people I have ever met.  Some part of me still assumed that good cheer and hard work, even if it was at the end of a course, could count for something.  It doesn’t.

Gerard has come to me for tutoring twice a week every week of the second semester.  I have been in close contact with his mother the whole time, and together we have verified that he is doing the work and preparing for the test.  When I am done tallying Gerard’s test, he has a 64.  I double check part III to no avail.  In desperation for one more elusive point I turn to part I and II.  Sometimes, very rarely, the scanning machine will be confused when a student marks one answer then erases and marks a different one.  I note in hope that Gerard’s paper contains several such ‘erasures’.  Unfortunately after hand checking the entire front side none of them seem to be mismarked.  As I turn the scantron over I see one final erasure on the back side.  Miraculously, it doesn’t check.  This answer ultimately is the only one mismarked by the machine out of all of our 200 tests – over 15000 questions.  Gerard passes with a 65. 

Yolanda, one of my newly discovered ESL students has a 66 the first time I check.  When the part III is verified by the other physics teacher, however, he finds a mistake I made and disagrees with me about a second one.  Its now 9:30 at night and we decide to hold the dispute for our supervisor tomorrow. 

8:00 am. The next day. 
With our passing rates holding steady around 80% (not at all bad for physics) we set to work on the last few difficult tests.  The day begins with a miracle.  Luis is not exactly playing with a full deck – this was his second year in my class and he probably averaged around 50% attendance over both years.  I get along well with Luis, and he is amiable and cooperative when he actually shows up.  He doesn’t do homework or take tests, but he is by no means dumb.  He is simply distracted – chronically depressed since the death of his father, often despairing and disparaging, he isn’t capable of giving it his whole. 

Luis turned in a blank scantron and no part III.  No one expected him to pass, almost as a formality we looked in his question book and discovered that some answers seemed to have been indicated in green highlighter.  He had left numerous blanks, however, a sure sign of failure (it was a multiple choice test after all – who leaves blanks?!)  But as we graded a strange pattern started to take shape – Luis, when he answered at all had, miraculously, answered correctly.  Finally, underneath the instructions to part III indicating to use the separate answer sheet, Luis had correctly indicated three answers – still in green highlighter. 

His final score – 67 – stands perhaps as the crowning achievement of my career as a teacher.   Luis had, to my mind, done one better than his classmate.  He had only worked the problems he felt that he knew and, throwing chance to the wind, had defeated the test only on the basis of his own porous body of knowledge. 

Orlando, with the missing part III – perhaps due to a proctoring error – was also graded.  And, in another minor miracle, with only parts I and II, he had a 65.  His part III was never found, yet he passed.

All that was left in the undecided pile was Yolanda.  Yolanda was an excellent student and had often done well on tests.  She studied regularly and had failed to miss even a single homework assignment.  If only I had known that she had language difficulties, I could have worked with her.  But now it was too late and her entire time in my class hung on the analysis of two questions worth two points each.  She needed three of the four possible points to pass.  Yolanda’s error was in reading the first problem literally and logically adjusting her answer to the first problem in a way that invalidated her answer to the second problem.  In working the problems as she did, she effectively changed the needed solution from two calculations, to three calculations.  After careful consultation with the state, it was determined that we could give credit for only one of the two answers, but not both.. Ultimately, the state gave Yudy two points for a grand total of 64.  Nothing else could be done; she had failed.

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As a teacher, these tests are a tool of my learning.  I now know things about my students that I didn’t before.  I know things about their psychology, strength of character, ability to persevere under adverse conditions, and even some of their ability to logically apply physics principles.  In determining who is rewarded with a diploma for passing the test or assigned to summer school for failure, the city and state know none of these things.  Life stories are played out on these numbers, but the state is only concerned with trying to avoid spending a dime more on human achievement than they must.  Perhaps because Yolanda speaks a less perfect version of English and so failed the test, our school will get greater funding from the city or state government. Perhaps somewhere, because of a number, the grand scheme will be altered. But nowhere in that number is Yolanda or any of my students, or me. 

© Daniel Stein, 2001

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