What I Wish I Knew Before My Kid Took the NY ESS Regents: A Parent’s Real Experience
Last June, at 9:47 pm, I was folding soccer laundry at the kitchen table while my 10th grader Lila crumpled a practice answer sheet and glared at her phone. She’d just bailed on her group chat where three friends from the other high school in our district were geeking out over their upcoming Living Environment Regents review. None of them had even heard of the ESS Regents. She looked up at me, deadpan, and said, “Am I the only person in the entire state of New York taking this stupid test?”
I pulled out my phone and googled “did anyone else take the ESS regents” right then. The top result was a 2019 Reddit thread with exactly that title, and three total replies. Two people said “yes, my kid took it last year” and the third said “what even is that?” That was it. No study guides, no parent threads, no tips from people who’d been there. Our district had switched the science sequence three years prior: all 10th graders take Earth and Space Science first, sit for the ESS Regents to meet one of their four graduation-required Regents, then take a second science Regents later. Most surrounding districts still do Living Environment first, so ESS flies under the radar for most parents. What felt like a weird, isolated experience to Lila is actually pretty common for any family whose district uses this sequence – you just don’t hear about it much.
We spent the next four weeks prepping, and I picked up a few concrete things that I wish someone had told me before we started. First, skip the fancy $25 review book you find on Amazon first. The New York State Education Department posts every recent Regents exam for free on their website, and those are the only practice materials you can trust. The big review books rarely get updated for ESS, because there aren’t enough people buying them to make it worth the publisher’s time. The review book we bought spent 22 pages on 19th century geological survey history that only had two multiple choice questions across the last four real exams. We ended up ditching the book halfway through, printed all the ESS Regents from 2018 to 2024 off the NYSED site, and that gave us a far clearer picture of what would actually be on the test.
The second thing no one talks about is how much of the ESS Regents relies on the Earth Science Reference Tables, or ESRT. You don’t need to memorize every mineral’s hardness or every planet’s orbit distance – all that info is right in the ESRT, which every kid gets for the test. Most kids just gloss over learning how to navigate it quickly during the school year, so that’s where we focused our extra time. We did 10 minute daily drills: I’d call out a question, like “what’s the latitude of the Tropic of Capricorn?” or “what’s the density of basalt?” and Lila would race to flip to the right page and find the answer. After two weeks, she could find any entry in 10 seconds or less, which saved her so much time on test day when she got stuck on harder open-response questions. That simple 10 minute a day habit made a bigger difference in her practice scores than any full weekend of cramming.
Half of Lila’s stress early on wasn’t even about the material. It was that feeling of being the only one, when everyone she knew was prepping for a different test. I didn’t just tell her “it’ll be okay” – I suggested she ask her teacher to connect her with a couple of other kids taking the ESS Regents to study with. She ended up meeting two girls from her class at the public library for an hour after school once a week. Half the time they just complained about how unfair it was that no one talks about this test, but they also caught gaps I never would have as someone who hasn’t taken earth science in 30 years. One week, all three of them got the same ellipse plotting question wrong because they misread the instruction to measure the distance between foci instead of the major axis. That small group catch fixed a mistake that probably would’ve cost her five points on the real test.
The day of the test, Lila forgot her calculator, and I sped to the school to drop it off, panicking the whole way that I’d get there too late and she’d be turned away. Turns out the proctor had a stack of spare calculators, and she was fine. She came out of the test saying most of the questions were exactly the types we’d practiced on the old NYSED exams, and the ellipse question was there just like her teacher said it would be. She got a 3, which is more than enough for her graduation requirement, and she was happy to close the book on it.
Last week, a friend of mine with a 10th grader at a district an hour away texted me. Her district just switched to the ESS first sequence this year, and she was googling around for info, couldn’t find anything. I sent her the NYSED link, told her about the 10 minute ESRT drills, and said she’s not crazy for feeling like she’s the only one looking for answers. It’s still one of those weird, underdiscussed New York public school things – you only know about it if your kid’s district does it, and there’s not much casual advice floating around. I still check that old Reddit thread every few months, and last week I added my own reply with the tips we picked up. There’s always another parent googling that question, looking for someone to say yeah, I’ve been there, and here’s what helped.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Wish I Knew Before My Kid Took the NY ESS Regents: A Parent’s Real Experience