Regents Recap — June 2014: Are They Reading?

Here is another installment in my series reviewing the NY State Regents exams in mathematics.

I have been reviewing New York State Math Regents exams for several years now, and I occasionally wonder if anyone involved in the production of the exams pays attention to what I say.

Well, last year I wrote about a problem on the Geometry exam that asked students to graph a compound locus but then incorrectly penalized them if they didn’t graph each individual locus.  The supervisor at the grading site didn’t take our complaints seriously, but It seems the exam authors eventually realized that this was wrong.

This is from the 2014 Geometry exam.

Notice how this question explicitly asks the student to graph both individual loci.

I doubt that my post instigated the change, but it is nice to see errors on these exams addressed every once in a while.