Some of the city’s public high schools have a dirty little secret: They’re inflating Regents exam scores to give more students a passing grade, The Post has learned.
Educators even have a name for the unwritten rule: “scrubbing.”
But it’s really cheating and test tampering, critics within the school system charge.
The explosive accusations surface as the city and state are administering Regents exams this week for the fall term.
And it comes at a time when students are now required to pass five Regents exams to graduate, school officials are held accountable for graduation rates and supervisors are eligible for merit-pay bonuses based on improved test scores.
Scrubbing is most often done on English and history exams because they have essay questions that are subjectively judged by reviewers.
The process starts when a student’s exam is reviewed separately by at least two teachers. The scores those teachers assign are averaged, as required under state rules.
Exam papers are then sent back to the respective departments, where some teachers – often under the guidance of assistant principals and veteran instructors – set aside tests that are just a few points shy of passing.
They then go back and “scrub” the results, changing the score from failing to passing by “finding” a few extra points in the essays.
“The students of the school benefit because they pass. The school benefits because the pass rate is up,” said a Staten Island high-school staffer, who, like others, requested anonymity.
“But it’s grade inflation. It’s cheating. You’re falsifying exams. It’s totally corrupt.”
It wasn’t hard to find staffers familiar with scrubbing at a number of schools, including Murry Bergtraum HS and Washington Irving HS in Manhattan; Canarsie HS, Sheepshead Bay HS and Lafayette HS in Brooklyn; and Port Richmond HS in Staten Island.
Some staffers defended the practice.
“I’m sorry if it’s shocking for laymen to hear. Scrubbing is something we do to help the kids get their asses out of high school,” a Manhattan English teacher said.
State and city education officials said they were not aware of “scrubbing.”
State Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman said state officials, who administer the Regents exams, review 10 percent of all exams to see if they are accurately scored.
“These reviews have not revealed anything that would indicate that teachers have been inappropriately adding points to students’ tests,” Burman said.
A city Department of Education spokeswoman said, “While we have no evidence that this is taking place in our schools, rest assured that we would not tolerate such activities and that we would take immediate and appropriate action in dealing with them.”
Making the grades
Here’s how “scrubbing” works in city schools:
1 A student’s exams are reviewed by at least two different teachers. The scores those teachers give are averaged, as required under state rules.
2 After the test scores are finalized, teachers from subject departments set aside the tests of students who narrowly failed.
3 The teachers go back and change (or “scrub”) some scores from a fail to a passing grade by finding extra points on a subjectively-marked portion of the exam, like an essay.