Regents Comparison
Preparing students to take the New York State regents is a year long journey. The teachers are pressured to teach all the material that could show up on an exam and the student is pressured to remember it all. Theses test are suppose to be a good example of what NYS students and teachers are capable of. I have chosen two Integrated Algebra regnant, June 2012 and June 2011, and compared them. I listed the topics that could show up on the test and how many times they did. I wanted to see if they are easily distributed or do they way heavily in one topic.
After reviewing both regents I could easily see that understanding variables and expressions, i.e. adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing polynomials, is an important topic on both regents. As well as dealing with inequalities and variables, i.e. graphing inequalities and dealing with linear equations, is another key topic on both regents. This doesn't surprise me because when one thinks about Algebra those are two areas that most people remember, they both involve solving or manipulating a variable. What I found surprising is that there is little emphasis on dealing with shapes, other than right triangles, as well as little emphasis on measurement. Those topics are two that will carry with the student when they are not in a math class, they are real world topics. The last thing that I noticed is that the regents, in these two years, did not have the student working with data in a written response. Overall both test seemed do-able, never asking the student to do something out of the blue. There was little abstract thinking involved mostly black and white content the student could easily recall.