The Regents Exams Are Out. The Panic Is Overblown.

New York's Board of Regents voted on September 14 to end the requirement that students pass a set of Regents exams to earn a high school diploma, starting with the class of 2028. The backlash arrived on schedule. Former governor George Pataki, who helped make the exams a graduation requirement during his tenure, told the New York Post that getting rid of them is "incredibly stupid" and "a really sad day for New York." Pataki accused the Education Department of scrapping the tests to hide failing schools. Governor Kathy Hochul, facing re-election, said through a spokesperson that she shares the concerns of New Yorkers about eliminating the standards and about what replaces them. Her Republican challenger, Bruce Blakeman, called for higher standards and real accountability for the state's education spending.

The anger rests on a premise worth questioning: that the Regents exams were doing the job they were advertised to do. The popular opinion is that removing a test means lowering a bar. The unpopular opinion is that the bar was already on the floor, and a lot of people who worked with it knew it.

The Regents exams were already hollow

Even defenders of rigorous standards have said the Regents exams stopped being a real measure long ago. Ray Domanico, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said the tests in recent decades were a bust, dumbed down to maintain or bolster graduation rates. The Post reported that the exams were also subjected to grade-fixing scandals, with passing lines moved to keep numbers up. An exam whose cutoff gets quietly lowered whenever too many students fail is not a standard. It is a paperwork exercise.

Current 12th graders are the last class required to pass the four-exam set in math, English, science and Global Studies to graduate, according to the Post. Students on track to graduate in 2028 will not have to pass the Regents exams to finish high school, though they can still take them. If those Regents exams had real teeth, dropping them would be a genuine loss. The evidence suggests they had not had teeth for years.

The best schools never needed the gate

State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa has a point her critics would rather skip past: elite private schools do not require Regents exams to hand out diplomas. Neither do most other states, per reporting from NEWS10. If exit exams were the load-bearing wall of educational quality, you would expect the strongest schools and the strongest states to have them. They mostly do not. The requirement survived in New York partly out of habit and partly because it let officials point to a number and call it accountability.

The State Education Department gave the sharpest version of that argument in its response to Pataki. When Pataki graduated from high school in Peekskill, the department noted, New York students could graduate without satisfying a Regents exam requirement, and that era still produced a graduate who went to Yale and became governor of New York. The remark is snide, but the logic holds: nobody seriously argues that the class of 1996 was better educated because of a gate that did not exist for it.

What replaces the Regents exams

The replacement is not nothing, though it is not finished either. The Board of Regents authorized the Education Department to move ahead with NY Inspires, a plan that creates a single New York State high school diploma and refocuses the Regents exams on measuring achievement against state learning standards rather than deciding who graduates. The new graduation requirements are expected to center on the state's Portrait of a Graduate, adopted in July 2025, with districts developing local assessments built on student work, performance tasks and classroom evidence rather than one multiple-choice-heavy sitting. Regulatory amendments are due before the Board by February 2027, with implementation in the 2027-28 school year.

This is the weakest part of the plan, and the critics have one fair hit here. Stan Litow, a SUNY Board of Trustees member and former New York City deputy schools chancellor, said removing an accountability system without a replacement in place is a flawed way of proceeding, adding that "you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." He is right about the sequencing. The department will require students to "recognize misinformation, distinguish fact from opinion, evaluate sources, and identify claims that are presented without important context," which is a fine ambition to write into a framework and a hard one to measure without turning into a test by another name.

The real fight is about trust

Strip away the politics and the dispute is really about trust: will a diploma earned without the old Regents exams mean the same thing to colleges and employers? That is a fair question, but it is not answered by keeping a gate that everyone involved knew how to work around. The old Regents exams measured test preparation and institutional compliance more than readiness was not protecting the value of the diploma. It was protecting the feeling that something was being checked.

The students who will be judged are not abstract. They are the same young people now entering a job market where entry-level hiring is thin and where, as recent GenZ NewZ reporting on the retirement-age debate notes, Gen Z is fighting for footing against older workers who are not leaving. Employers checking a diploma will not care whether a candidate passed the Regents exams in 2027. They will care whether the candidate can do the work, which is the same question the new portfolios are supposed to answer, and which the old Regents exams answered poorly.

None of this means the new system will succeed. New York's education establishment has earned skepticism, and a framework that promises "creative innovators" and "global citizens" can easily become jargon over substance. But that is an argument for watching the replacement like a hawk, not for defending a test that had already failed on its own terms. The panic assumes the old gate was holding something up. Look at the condition it was in, and the braver move is the honest one: take it down and build something that actually measures what students learn.

The unpopular opinion, stated plainly, is that losing the Regents exams as a graduation requirement is not the dumbing down of New York schools. It is New York schools admitting what the exams had become. What comes next, as career coverage here has shown, will be decided by what students can actually do, not by what test they survived.

Sources: New York Post reporting on the Regents phaseout (September 27) and the State Education Department announcement via the NY Inspires press release.