How to Actually Use the 2015 Chemistry Regents Answers When Studying
The New York State Education Department posts the June 2015 Chemistry Regents exam and its scoring rubric publicly. You can find them on their website under past examinations. Most students just want the answer key so they can check their work after taking a practice test, but the real value is in how you approach the scoring guide rather than just glancing at a list of letter choices. I used to tell my students to take the exam timed, grade it with the official scoring guide, and then go back and re-do every question they missed or barely got credit for. That second pass usually takes about as long as the original exam, so budget two hours total. The June 2015 exam had 35 multiple choice questions and about 25-30 constructed response items spread across four parts. Parts B-2 and C had some of the more notorious questions that students struggle with, particularly around gas laws and organic nomenclature. The scoring rubric is not just an answer key. For constructed response questions, it tells you exactly what earns one point, two points, or zero. I remember one student who lost points on a thermochemistry problem in 2015 because she wrote the heat equation but never actually solved for q. The rubric was clear: showing the formula without substituting values gets partial credit at best, and depending on the question, sometimes zero. She retakes that same problem a week later and gets full credit because she changed her setup. That kind of targeted correction is what actually moves your score.
Download the exam PDF first, then the scoring rubric PDF, and keep them side by side. Work through the multiple choice using a scantron sheet or just mark your answers on a separate piece of paper so you are not tempted to look back at the questions repeatedly. After you finish, grade yourself strictly against the rubric. Do not be generous with constructed response. If the rubric says it needs a specific unit and you left it off, that is a lost point. The examiners do not make exceptions, and neither should you during practice. One thing nobody warns you about: the 2015 exam uses the 2011 Chemistry Reference Tables, which were still in effect at the time. If you are studying with older reference tables from before 2011, some of the values and even the format of certain tables will differ slightly. I had a student once pull the wrong reference tables and spent twenty minutes confused about why her solubility calculations did not match the answer key. Make sure your reference tables match the year of the exam you are working with. The multiple choice section for June 2015 had questions on topics like electron configuration, stoichiometry, equilibrium, and acid-base chemistry. The constructed response sections covered organic chemistry naming, stoichiometry calculations, gas law problems, solution concentration, and thermodynamics. If you are weak on a particular topic, pull out just the relevant questions from this exam and do them three times over the course of a week with increasing speed. That repetition tends to stick better than doing three different exams on three different days without review.
There is a limit to what any single past exam can do for you. The 2015 Chemistry Regents is only one administration. If you fail questions about electrochemistry or nuclear reactions, that exam may not have as many of those as the current exam format typically includes. Supplement it with the August 2015 administration and the January 2015 exam if you can find those. The question distribution shifts enough between administrations that practicing on all three gives you better coverage than grinding a single exam five times. The answer key alone will not raise your score. What raises your score is knowing where you lost points, understanding the exact requirement the rubric demands, and fixing that specific mistake before the real exam. That is the part most students skip because it is tedious. It is also the only part that matters.
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