Central District to dump geometry scores if harmful to students' GPAs

The Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District will not count students’ scores on this year’s geometry Regents exam unless they boost their GPAs, after it was discovered that at least two test questions had either more than one or no correct answer.

Michael Harrington, the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said the district made the same decision last year, when the test was first implemented as a Common Core exam.

“Some of these exams have really taken a toll on these kids’ averages,” Harrington said, adding that the weight of Regents exams on students’ GPAs dropped from 20 percent in 2015 to 12 percent this year.

The district opted for what Harrington referred to as a “safe, harmless policy” for the geometry Regents. Bellmore-Merrick Superintendent John DeTommaso said the district has followed such a policy for past state exams that the administration said did not reflect student performance.

“It’s not about the difficulty” of the exam,” he said. “It’s about the fairness.”

Harrington said that the decision about the geometry Regents was made days before the State Education Department’s announcement that a third question on the exam had no “clear and correct answer.”

After the geometry Regents was administered, the state posted a notice on its website that two of the 24 multiple-choice questions had more than one correct answer. On July 25, the Education Department sent letters to teachers saying that Question 24 also had no clear answer.

Initially, only students correctly answering Question 24 received credit, but now all students will. When changing the grades of students’ tests, Harrington said, “We had 21 students passing the exam who have originally failed. It’s pretty remarkable.”

The mistake on Question 24 was found after Ben Catalfo, 16, of East Setauket, went over the problem with a group of students he tutors. To find the solution, he discovered, he needed to use a mathematical formula not taught in class. Catalfo started an online petition on July 17, asking state officials not to penalize students who did not mark the correct answer. The petition now has more than 2,700 signatures.

“I think we’ve made it pretty evident to parents that what we do is in the best interest of the kids,” Harrington said. He suggested that the State Education Department should collaborate with schools to ensure that Regents exams are “more reflective of the curriculum throughout the year.”

Jeanette Deutermann, a North Bellmore mother who founded the group Long Island Opt Out, had an alternative suggestion. As an opponent of Common Core testing, Deutermann said that exams are not reflective of students’ abilities, and that the district must keep up with 21st century education methods.

Her suggestion involves project-based learning, which replaces exit exams with immersive, hands-on projects that students present to a panel of teachers at the end of the school year. However, Deutermann acknowledged that the idea cannot be acted on in the district because of the Education Transformation Act of 2015, which ties a teacher’s evaluation to test scores.

The “safe and harmless policy,” she said, is a good compromise.