Regents

If your student is enrolled in New York schools, they will likely need to pass the Regents Examinations in order to get their diploma. These tests can be challenging, and a tutor can be very helpful to your student in the subjects that they are being tested in. The Regents Examinations are standardized exams given in core high school subjects in New York State that provide a measure of student achievement. To earn a Regents Diploma, students must pass these exams.

In most cases, to graduate, a student needs to have taken the appropriate number of credited courses — usually a minimum of 22 credits in their required courses — and pass at least five Regents exams in certain subject areas with a minimum score of 65 or higher. Students who are high achieving can go on to earn a Regents with Advanced or Honors designations. For example, with a regular Regents diploma, students must pass one math, one science, one English Language Arts, one language other than English, and one social studies Regents examination.

What Are the Benefits of Working with a Regents Tutor?

One of the biggest and best benefits to working with a Regents tutor is that your student will receive one-on-one personalized study with a professional who is experienced in the specific area of studying you sign up for them to receive tutoring in.

If your student has areas that they are already skilled in, their tutor won’t spend as much time on it as they will in areas of possible improvement and where your student needs particular help. As part of the individual tutoring sessions, your student can spend as much time as they need to on each particular area. When working in this one-on-one setting, your student can feel comfortable to ask any questions that they have. They can feel confident to move out of their comfort zone to work with the tutor, as opposed to being in a classroom where there could be more than 20 sets of eyes on them asking a question. Their Regents tutor will also work to understand how your student learns, both through talking with them and watching how they learn and study.

Having this information allows the Regents tutor to produce a customized learning program for your student base on his or her individual needs. These are adaptable lesson plans but are designed to focus on how your student learns best. If your student is a visual learner, the Regents tutor may include more visual aids, such as illustrations or diagrams, to help the information sink in. Our Regents tutors will work with your student to prepare for the test in other ways, as well.

To earn a Regents diploma with Advanced designation, your student needs to pass two science exams, three math, one English Language Arts exam, one language other than English, and one social studies exam. Currently, Regents examinations are primarily administered via the computer. The tests are created three years in advance, which gives the committees time to field test the specific exams.

When your student sits for the Regents exams, they are taking a three hour long test. The one exception is the Earth Science exam, which also has a roughly 41 minute laboratory component which is given a few weeks before the written exam. When your student works with one of our Regents tutors, they are getting more than just content review, even though that is a large portion of what your student will be spending time on during their sessions.

They will help your student learn to work within the confines of the time limit on the test, reviewing how to answer questions and work on time management skills that can be used on test day and with future assessments. The Regents tutor can work with them on ways to narrow down multiple choice answers, such as finding the best way to pick between two answers. In some cases, a guess is better than leaving the question unanswered, and a Regents tutor will help coach your student through when this is appropriate.

The tutor will generally also assign practice tests to help your student become more familiar with the style and timing of each portion of the test. This can help your student and their tutor work out any pacing issues that may arise and help have these issues get resolved before test day. As your student and their Regents tutor work through sample questions, your student will generally learn tips to help them take a standardized test.

If there is a passage, the tutor may coach them to read the associated questions or practice active reading and note-taking when reading in order to save time and pull material for the questions from the passage while they read. Like time management skills, these are important skills that can benefit your student down the road, in future Regents exams or courses, even college-level ones.