The New York State Board of Regents voted on September 14, 2026 to stop requiring students to pass Regents exams to earn a high school diploma, approving a plan that makes this year’s seniors the last cohort held to the 25-year-old five-exam standard. Students graduating in the 2027-28 school year and after will receive a single New York State diploma with no separate assessment requirement attached.
The timing is awkward: many colleges have spent two years moving the other direction, and every Ivy League school now requires SAT or ACT scores again.
The three existing credentials (local diploma, Regents diploma, and Regents with Advanced Designation) collapse into one, with advanced work recognized through a seal or endorsement instead. Regents exams survive as a measure of state standards, and the Education Department will build new high school accountability tests to satisfy federal ESSA requirements.
Districts will design their own local assessment strategies covering classroom work, performance tasks, and educator observation, alongside expanded credit options such as dual enrollment coursework that counts toward both a diploma and a degree. Regulatory amendments will be a Board discussion item in February 2027 and come back for adoption in June 2027, according to the Daily News.
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Why It Matters
A high school diploma is what drives a person’s next financial decision. It determines college admission and federal aid eligibility, and parents read it as a signal that a student can handle college-level work — the assumption sitting underneath every calculation of whether a degree will return more than it costs.
New York graduated 85% of its 2021 cohort within four years, per state data. Removing the exam requirement would almost certainly lift that rate without changing the underlying skills behind it.
The downstream costs would inevitably fall on the student and society as a whole. Remedial college courses carry tuition and consume federal loan eligibility while awarding no degree credit, and researchers put the national bill at roughly $7 billion a year, The 74 reported. Fewer than 10% of students assigned to remediation earned an associate degree within three years in the underlying study. That is borrowed money spent relearning high school, added to a national balance that just reached $1.86 trillion.
And for society, we want an educated populace. Without a basic measuring tool of what the results are, it’s impossible to correct learning deficiencies.
The Case For Sunsetting The Exams
State officials argue the exams were asked to do three incompatible jobs at once: measure standards, drive accountability, and certify college readiness. Assistant Commissioner Zachary Warner told the Board the change has “nothing to do with lowering standards,” and pointed out that elite private schools skip Regents exams entirely and their graduates do just fine. The strongest argument is that a single timed test in June is a poor readiness signal compared with four years of evidence. But that’s also a position that mirrors the reasoning behind the spread of test-optional admissions policies.
There is also an equity case too. Students who finish every required course but fail one exam currently leave with no credential, pushed toward low-wage work or a restart through trade programs financed with their own borrowing.
The Case Against
The big case against removing the exam is simply understanding whether high school graduates completed with enough basic knowledge to continue onward in education or their careers. Board members raised the objection themselves. Vice Chancellor Judith Chin asked how the state would ensure reliability and said “many of us are questioning whether or not we as a Regents are dumbing down the assessment,” according to an account of the meeting. Regent Weinman Shorenstein questioned how the state would compare outcomes across districts using different local assessments. Neither question got a full answer, and the replacement framework does not exist yet.
The problem is that the state is removing a common yardstick and promising to design its replacement during the same window. Three risks follow:
- No comparability. Every district writing its own assessment strategy produces its own definition of proficient, which makes district-to-district comparison (and honest school accountability) close to impossible.
- Grade inflation fills the vacuum. With no external check, the transcript becomes the only signal, and grades have been drifting upward for years.
- The learning gap gets worse. National 12th grade results already show 45% of seniors below NAEP Basic in math and 32% below in reading, both record highs, the National Assessment Governing Board reported. The same release found more seniors accepted to four-year colleges than in 2019 while fewer were ready for entry-level coursework.
The California Warning
New York is running an experiment California already started. The University of California went test-blind in 2021, and the results at one campus are hard to ignore: UC San Diego’s remedial math enrollment went from 32 students in fall 2020 to 921 in fall 2025 (11.8% of the incoming class) a nearly 30-fold jump, Inside Higher Ed reported. We covered how recently the campus ran out of seats in its remedial math course.
These students were admitted on strong GPAs alone. More than 600 UC faculty have since signed a letter asking the system to reinstate testing for applicants, arguing that grade inflation and AI-assisted work have broken the transcript as a readiness signal, the Daily Bruin reported.
New York is now removing its last external check at the high school level, despite having the California data already in hand.
How This Connects
The pattern seems to be repeating itself: remove a measurement, watch the credential inflate, then find the issue later when somebody is paying tuition for it. Test-optional admissions masked poor math preparation at the high school level before anyone quantified it, and families end up paying the costs through extra semesters and debt loads that keep climbing at graduation.
For New York families, the practical move is to stop treating the diploma as evidence of readiness. Have students sit the Regents exams anyway (they still exist) and treat dual enrollment or AP results as outside verification, especially since 66% of high schoolers say their schools steer them toward four-year college without a clear read on preparation.
Plus, as more and more colleges are requiring the SAT and ACT again, getting a jumpstart on those national exams will give you a clear sense of any gaps and preparation that may be needed.
What’s Next
Watch three dates. State Education Department staff return to the Board in November 2026 with revisions to New York’s federal ESSA plan. Then draft regulatory amendments will be up to the Board in February 2027, with adoption scheduled for June 2027 and an effective date of July 1, 2027.
The detail that matters most is what the new statewide high school accountability assessment actually measures and looks like. There’s sadly a high potential New York will have removed a key standard without replacing it with a solid new one.
Editor: Colin Graves
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Robert Farrington is the founder of The College Investor and is widely recognized as one of the nation’s leading voices on student loan debt and saving for college. He holds an MBA from UC San Diego Rady School of Management and has spent over 15 years researching, writing, and advising on student loans, 529 plans, financial aid programs, and saving and investing for young professionals.
Robert has been featured in the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, NBC News, and Forbes, where he has been a regular personal finance contributor for over a decade. His work combines both professional expertise and personal experience – he successfully navigated his own student loan repayment journey and has helped thousands of readers do the same.
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