What No One Tells You About the NY ESS Regents: A Parent’s Firsthand Experience
It was 7:15 a.m. last June, and I was pouring oat milk into my coffee when my 9th grader Lila slammed her ESS Regents review book shut hard enough to rattle the salt shaker next to her half-eaten everything bagel. “Did literally anyone else in the entire state actually understand that last practice question about convergent plate boundaries?” she said, prodding her phone with a sharp index finger. “I checked three group chats, and half the kids are skipping this exam to take it later, and the other half are just guessing on every short answer.”
I’ll admit, I had no frame of reference. I grew up on Long Island going to public school, and the last science Regents I took was the old Earth Science Regents, back when phones still had physical keyboards. I’d never even heard of ESS, short for Earth and Space Science, until Lila came home last fall saying it was the required introductory science Regents for graduation now. When I posted that question Lila asked—“Did anyone else take the ESS Regents and feel this confused?”—in our district’s parent Facebook group, I got 47 replies within an hour. Almost every single one said the same thing: my kid is stressed out of their mind, none of the study materials make sense, and we have no idea what to expect either.
I’d dropped $20 on that big neon review book at the school’s curriculum night back in September, and for three months, Lila had been squeezing in 20 minutes of practice after homework every night. When we compared the practice questions in the book to the sample test posted on the New York State Education Department website, I realized why she was confused. Half the topics the review book spent chapters on had been cut from the ESS Regents framework three years earlier, and the open response questions didn’t match the structure of the actual test at all. We’d wasted months on content that wasn’t even going to show up.
I went to Lila’s science teacher, Ms. Henderson, after school that week to ask what was going on. Ms. Henderson has been teaching 9th grade science for 18 years, and she just leaned back in her chair and sighed. She said the ESS Regents only fully replaced the old Earth Science Regents in 2020, so third-party publishers are still playing catch-up to update their materials. Most teachers are still adjusting to the test’s scoring rules too—for the open response questions, graders are looking for very specific vocabulary words, and kids lose points even if their general idea is right. That’s why so many kids walk out thinking they did fine, then end up three or four points short of a passing 65.
Test day came, and Lila had extended time as an accommodation for her ADHD, so she reported to a separate testing room in the special ed wing. She came out an hour after the regular testing block ended, and her shoulders were hunched. Half the kids in the room finished an hour early, she said, and the proctor let them leave quietly, but everyone was talking in the hallway right outside the door, so she couldn’t concentrate for the last 45 minutes. When scores came out four weeks later, she got a 62. Three points away from passing.
That’s when we threw out the old review book and started over with what we learned from other parents and Ms. Henderson. We signed up for the August retake, and the first change we made was ditching third-party study materials entirely. I just went to the NYSED website, downloaded all four released ESS Regents exams from 2022 to 2024, and printed them out for free. Every question aligned to the current framework, no extra fluff. It seems obvious now, but most of us default to buying a printed book from the school book fair because it feels easier than digging through a government website. For a new test like ESS, though, the official materials are the only reliable option.
The second small change made the biggest difference for Lila. I emailed our district’s testing coordinator a full week before the August retake. I explained that Lila had extended time, and asked if she could be placed in a smaller testing room with fewer kids, to cut down on hallway distractions from people leaving early. It took the coordinator two minutes to adjust the assignment, no pushback, no extra paperwork. Most parents don’t know you can ask for that small, specific adjustment, but it completely changed Lila’s test experience. She said the August room was quiet, no one roamed the hallway mid-test, so she could take her time going back over her answers.
Third, we didn’t cram for four hours every weekend. We spent 15 minutes each night going over the sample open response answers that NYSED posts with every released test. We just looked at one question per night, compared the 0-point, 1-point, and 2-point sample answers, and Lila could see exactly what vocabulary the graders wanted. She kept forgetting to use “index of refraction” instead of “bending of light” on one common question type, for example, and after seeing the sample, she remembered to add the exact phrase on test day. That small habit was the difference between getting full points and half points on five different questions, which ended up being enough to push her over the passing threshold.
Lila got a 71 on the retake, and we checked the exam off her list. This year, she’s in 10th grade prepping for the Living Environment Regents, a test that’s been around for decades, and it’s a totally different vibe. There are decades of practice tests, every teacher knows exactly what to expect, and kids know what they’re getting into. I still see that question pop up in our parent group every May and June: “Did anyone else take the ESS Regents? Is this much stress normal?” I always reply with the three small changes that worked for us. It’s not going to make state testing enjoyable, and there are still a lot of kinks to work out of a new exam that affects thousands of New York kids every year. Some things are still inconsistent—some districts have great proctoring, some don’t, some teachers have time to go over rubrics, some don’t. But the biggest thing I learned is that that confusion most of us feel is totally normal, because almost no one has been through this test before. It’s okay to fumble through it, and small, simple changes cut down far more on stress than any expensive review course or fancy tutor. For right now, that’s enough.
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