A clear explanation of the data and the method, so you can judge how much weight to give the numbers.
Every number here comes from the New York State Education Department’s School Report Card databases, which give, for every public school, every district, every county and the state, the number of students who took each Regents exam and how many of them landed in each performance level. Those are real student counts, and we use them exactly as NYSED printed them. NYSED does not publish an average Regents score, so each group’s average is estimated from its level counts.
A year here is a school year: 2025 means August 2024, January 2025 and June 2025. NYSED replaced the Common Core math and English exams one at a time (Algebra I in June 2024, Geometry in June 2025, English Language Arts and Algebra II in June 2026), so in a changeover year the older exam was given only in August and January, and both versions appear. The tool keeps them apart because each has its own score ranges. There were no Regents exams in 2020. In 2021 only four exams were given, in June, and students who met certain criteria could skip them; in 2022 only the June exams were given and the US History exam was canceled. The 2025-26 results (including the first new English Language Arts and Algebra II exams) are not published yet.
US History and Government changed exams after 2019: the 2018 and 2019 results are the older exam, with four levels, and the 2023 to 2025 results are the newer Framework exam, with five. A score is always compared with students who took the same exam that year.
Each student counts once per exam per school year, at their highest score from that year’s August, January and June exams. This is how NYSED reports “annual” Regents results. A student who took Algebra I in January and again in June is counted once, with the better score.
The data covers public schools, including charter schools. Private and religious schools are not included, and neither are their students in the district, county or state numbers. Students in grades 7 and 8 who take a Regents exam early, most often Algebra I, Living Environment or Earth Science, are counted at their middle school: schools whose names say they are middle, junior high or intermediate schools account for about 47,000 to 51,000 Algebra I takers a year, about one in five.
When fewer than 5 students at a school took an exam, NYSED hides all of that school’s results for it, so the school is not shown for that exam. Those students are still counted in their district, county and the state. In 2021 and in the two changeover years (Common Core Algebra I in 2024 and Common Core Geometry in 2025), far fewer students than usual took the exam, and the tool shows a note with those results.
NYSED publishes the scale-score range for each performance level (e.g. for Algebra I, Level 3 is 65-74). Given a score, we:
That gives the percentile: the estimated share of students in the group who scored at or below the entered score.
The bell-like curve on each chart is a truncated-normal distribution fitted so that its area within each performance level matches the group’s level counts. The level counts set the headline percentile (steps above); the curve only decides where inside the student’s own level the line falls.
We checked the curve against New York City’s own published Regents results (NYC Public Schools, 2018 to 2023), which print, for every school, how many students scored 80 or higher. On the exams where 80 is not one of the level boundaries, the curve fitted to NYSED’s citywide counts predicted the share scoring 80 or higher within 0.1 to 4.1 points of the city’s actual share, 1.7 points low on average. English Language Arts scores bunch toward the top of the 0 to 100 scale and trail off at the bottom, which a bell curve can’t fully show: there the estimated average runs about 4 points above the city’s real average, while the share scoring 80 or higher still lands within 1.6 points.
When a group’s students all sit in one or two levels, the counts can’t say how spread out their scores are. Some Regents levels are only 5 to 10 points wide, so a small school with nearly everyone in one of them can also fit a curve that is too narrow. Curves are kept no narrower than one fifth of the statewide spread, which is about the size of the test’s own measurement error.
Regents exams are scored from 0 to 100. A score of 65 or higher (Level 3 and above) passes the exam, and is what NYSED counts as proficient. Each exam’s score comes from a conversion chart for that administration, so not every number from 0 to 100 actually occurs.
The math, English Language Arts and social studies exams on the newer standards have five levels: Level 1 is 0-54, Level 2 is 55-64, Level 3 starts at 65, and Level 5 starts at 85. Level 4 starts at 75 for the new Algebra I, 76 for US History and Government (Framework) and Life Science: Biology, 77 for Earth and Space Sciences, 78 for Algebra II, 79 for English Language Arts and Global History and Geography II, and 80 for Common Core Algebra I and both Geometry exams. The other exams have four levels: 0-54, 55-64, 65-84 and 85-100.
Every range comes from NYSED’s Performance Level Score Ranges for Regents and Regents Common Core Exams, one page per school year. For the two new 2025 science exams that table leaves a gap below 55 and below 65; NYSED’s June 2025 conversion charts never give a score of 54 (or 64 on Biology), so the levels start at the same 55 and 65. The score range for each level, by exam and year, is on the score guides.
The paid progress report puts every Regents exam your child took in one table, with the percentile at each level from the school to the state, and charts each subject across the years.
This site stores nothing you type. Scores are used only in your browser to draw your charts.
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