How to Study for NY Geometry and Life Science Regents in 2 Days: Practical Tips From a High School Teacher
7:12 PM on a Wednesday in June, I’m wiping spaghetti sauce off the kitchen counter, a half-eaten slice of garlic bread sweating next to the toaster, when my 10th grader Lila drops two thick textbooks on the table hard enough to rattle the salt shaker. “Mom,” she says, voice flat, “I just checked the Regents schedule. Geometry and Living Environment are both the day after tomorrow. I have two whole days. What on earth do I do?”
As a 12-year high school math teacher in an upstate NY public district, I’ve had this conversation at least 20 times this time of year. Kids get wrapped up in end-of-year soccer, AP exams, graduation parties for older siblings, and suddenly two big Regents creep up before they’re ready. It’s not laziness, usually. It’s just being a teen with too many things going on. Lila had played in a sectional soccer championship the week before and skipped study days to go to her best friend’s out-of-state birthday weekend, and she’d mixed up the test dates. “I can’t fail,” she said. “I need both to get into the marine biology summer program I want. I swear I thought they were a week apart.”
I pulled out a chair next to her and pulled up the NYSED website on my laptop. All the generic “study hard” advice doesn’t work when you only have 48 hours. I already knew what gets results, because I’ve watched dozens of students pull this off. First thing I told her: close the textbooks. We’re not reading chapter reviews. That’s for people who have two weeks, not two days. If you spend six hours reading every topic you covered this year, you’ll zone out halfway, forget most of it, and end up with nothing to show for it. The only things we need are three of the most recent past Regents exams for each test (free to download and print, no fancy $30 review book needed), her graded unit tests from this school year, a pack of 3×5 index cards, and her calculator.
Next we set a schedule. No splitting each day into four hours Geometry, four hours Life Science switching back and forth. Context switching kills your focus when you’re cramming, and you end up retaining half as much. Our first full day would be 80% Geometry, with a 90-minute wrap-up at the end of the day to sort practice questions for Living Environment. The second full day would be 80% Living Environment, with a 90-minute review of all Geometry notes before bed, and we stop studying at 10 PM sharp, no exceptions. No all-nighters. A tired brain can’t recall anything you crammed anyway, so sleep is worth more than an extra three hours of bleary studying.
What do you actually do with those past exams, anyway? For Geometry, we started with one full past exam. No need to time it at first. Lila just went question by question, and marked every one she wasn’t 100% sure of, even if she thought she might get it right. Then we checked answers against the official key, and grouped all her wrong answers by topic. When she finished, it was obvious: five wrong on triangle similarity, four wrong on equations of circles, three wrong on parallelogram proofs, and only one wrong across every other topic. That told us exactly where to spend time, not wasting a minute on the angle relationships or constructions she already got right every time.
For every topic she missed more than one question on, she wrote one simple rule on an index card. For similarity, she wrote “AA/SSS/SAS similarity: cross multiply proportional sides to solve.” For proofs, which half my students panic over and leave blank, she wrote “Write down every given as a statement first, you get points for that even if you can’t finish the full proof.” No long, fancy notes. Just the thing she’d messed up, written in her own words. By the end of the day, she had 17 index cards total for Geometry, and that was all she needed to review.
We adjusted the same method for Living Environment, because that test has a different rhythm. Most points come from multiple choice, and they repeat the same common misconceptions over and over year after year. Lila mixed up mitosis and meiosis every time, so she wrote that difference on a card. She messed up food web energy flow, so she wrote “Only 10% of energy moves up each level, top predators get the least.” We also looked at the official answer keys for free response to see what actually gets points. Turns out, they don’t care about pretty full sentences. They just care that you use the right buzzword. If the question asks for an example of human impact on ecosystems, writing “invasive species outcompete native species” gets full points, no extra explanation needed. That’s a trick most kids don’t figure out until they’ve wasted 10 minutes writing a paragraph for a 2-point question.
We stuck to 50 minutes of studying, 10 minute break, no phones at the table during study time. Breaks were whatever she wanted: scroll TikTok, walk the dog, get a soda from the gas station down the street. I didn’t hover, didn’t quiz her every 10 minutes. I just checked in every couple hours to help if she got stuck on a concept.
By the end of the two days, Lila had 22 index cards for Living Environment to go with her 17 for Geometry. She read through all of them twice the night before the test, and we turned off the kitchen light at 10:15, right on schedule.
A week later, we got her scores back: 82 on Geometry, 79 on Living Environment. It’s not the highest scores she could’ve gotten if she’d studied over a month, but it’s more than enough for her summer program requirement, and she passed both, which is what she needed. She told me over ice cream after we saw the scores that she’ll never let this happen again, and I believe her… mostly. I know next year when she has her Algebra 2 and Chemistry Regents, she’ll probably get wrapped up in prom and her part-time barista job and cut it close again. If she does, this plan works. It doesn’t require fancy tools, it doesn’t require 16 hours of nonstop studying, it just requires focusing on what actually gets you points on these specific tests, instead of doing the busy work that feels productive but doesn’t help. It’s not a long-term solution, and I don’t recommend cramming for big tests as a habit. But when life leaves you with two days, it’s enough.
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