Among the city students to take the state’s English Regents exams on Tuesday are 75 students at Chelsea Career and Technical High School whose original exams were lost.
The exams, which the students took in June, were never graded after being sent off to Connecticut for scanning by McGraw-Hill, the testing company that administered this year’s Regents exams. For the first time, exams left the city to be scanned electronically so teachers could score items by computer, in a process that was so full of glitches that the city is reconsidering its contract with McGraw-Hill.
The UFT is planning to hold a rally at Chelsea on Tuesday morning to call attention to the exams’ disappearance, which officials originally said they hoped would be temporary.
“We were told that the test booklets were on a truck, somehow the boxes of tests fell out,” Chelsea English teacher Jan Scott said in a statement released by the UFT. “Some they recovered, but not ours. Ours they said blew out on the road. Who knows if that is the truth. All my students know is that no one ever found their test and now they have to take the English Regents exam all over again.”
Students across the city are retaking the high school exams that are required for graduation this week. Many students said they intended to appeal their scores on tests graded under the new system when the scores came back lower than they expected. But appeals could not be conducted in time to prevent students from needing to take the exams again. Teachers only recently received images of students’ responses that allow them to assess whether the exams received inappropriately low scores.