Getting Your Hands on the 2020 Chemistry Regents Answer Key
If you are looking at the Chemistry: The Physical Setting Regents exam from January or June 2020 and want the official answer key, you are dealing with a standardized testing document that has been publicly archived by the New York State Education Department. The exam itself is split into three parts. Part A has 35 multiple choice questions. Part B-1 continues with more multiple choice. Part B-2 and Part C require written responses, calculations, and short answers. The answer key tells you exactly which bubbles to fill in for the multiple choice sections and provides scoring rubrics for the open-ended questions. I spent a lot of time going through these answer keys when I was tutoring students. The 2020 version is no different from the ones before it in format. You can find the actual PDF documents on the NYSED website under their Regents examination archive. Search for "Chemistry The Physical Setting Regents January 2020" or "June 2020" and you will land on a page that links directly to the exam, the corresponding answer key, and the performance indicator report. Nothing complicated about that part.
Chemistry The Physical Setting Answer Key 2020
The direct route is through the official NYSED exam archive. Here is what you need to know about using these keys effectively instead of just scrolling through them passively. The multiple choice answer key lists question numbers one through 35 for Part A and 51 through 65 for Part B-1. Each entry shows the correct letter choice. That is straightforward. The real value is in the scoring rubrics for Parts B-2 and C. Those are where students lose points consistently and where the answer key becomes genuinely useful. The rubric does not just tell you the right answer. It tells you what partial credit looks like and what kinds of wrong answers still earn points. One specific edge case I ran into repeatedly involved question 61 on the June 2020 exam. It asked students to identify the type of bonding in a given compound and justify their answer based on electronegativity differences. The scoring guidelines accepted several valid justifications. Some students cited the exact electronegativity values from the Reference Table. Others described the bond as ionic because one element was a metal and the other was a nonmetal. Both approaches earned full credit. The answer key would have been useless to those students if they had not also studied the Reference Tables sheet, which is provided during the actual exam. That table is critical for almost every calculation question on the test.
Another thing most people miss is the scoring key for calculation questions. For example, question 64 on the January 2020 exam required students to calculate the mass of a product using stoichiometry. The rubric gave one point for setting up the mole ratio correctly, one point for the correct mathematical setup, and one point for the final answer with proper significant figures. Students who got the right answer but forgot significant figures still lost a point. I watched this happen dozens of times. The answer key makes this clear if you actually read the rubric carefully instead of just glancing at it. There are a few limitations you should be aware of. The answer keys from 2020 are based on the exam format that was in place before the major curriculum updates that started rolling out afterward. If you are studying for a current exam, the content overlaps heavily but some topic weighting has shifted. The reference tables have been updated in recent years too, so certain constant values or conversion factors listed on the 2020 key may not match exactly what you will see on a newer exam. Also, the NYSED sometimes releases an official score converter alongside the answer key that changes from year to year. The 2020 converter is not applicable to later exams. If you want the raw exam and key documents, go to the NYSED Regents examination page and look under Chemistry. The files are free and do not require any login. Third-party sites repost these keys constantly. I usually stick with the official source because the PDFs there are clean and include the scoring rubrics in the same document. Some of the reposted versions strip out the open-ended scoring guidelines and only keep the multiple choice answers, which cuts the usefulness in half.
Get the Full Details
The answer key is a tool. It works best when you use it after attempting the exam under timed conditions rather than reading it beforehand. That way you can actually see where your gaps are. The scoring rubrics for Parts B-2 and C are where the studying happens. They show you exactly what the graders are looking for and what phrasing earns points. Go through every free response question, compare your work to the rubric, and note the pattern. That pattern is what shows up on the actual exam.
