Where to Find and How to Use the January 2020 Regents Exam Answer Keys
The New York State Education Department posts every Regents exam answer key on their official website under the "Testing & Assessments" section. For the January 2020 administration, the keys are organized by subject and released alongside the scored score sheets that teachers use for grading. You can navigate to the NYSED testing portal, select the January 2020 exam date, and pull up the document. It is not particularly hidden, but the layout on their site is archaic enough that first-time users often spend ten minutes clicking around before finding the right PDF. I spent a bunch of time last year helping students track down these materials because several reliable third-party sites had outdated or incomplete uploads. The only source I trust now is the state site directly. Each subject has its own page — Algebra I, Living Environment, Earth Science, U.S. History, and so on. The answer key PDF is usually labeled something like "January 2020 Scoring Key" rather than "Answer Key," which tripped me up more than once. The scoring key contains the correct answers for the multiple-choice section and the rubric for constructing responses. Here is the practical thing most people miss: the multiple-choice answer sheet is separate from the scoring rubric for part C and part D questions. If you are grading practice tests or checking your own work, you need both documents. The scoring key gives you the point value for each constructed response. For example, in the January 2020 Algebra I exam, question 36 was worth 4 credits and the rubric specified exactly what steps had to be shown to earn full marks. A student who wrote the correct final answer but skipped the required algebraic manipulation would only get partial credit, sometimes just one out of four points.
I ran into a specific problem last spring when a student brought me a scoring key that had been circulated through a tutoring center. The multiple-choice answers for the January 2020 Chemistry Regents were wrong starting at question 18. The real NYSED version had "C" as the answer to question 18; the leaked copy had "D." This kind of error is rare but it happens, and it matters because students across the district ended up studying incorrect information. Always cross-reference with the state site before relying on any third-party upload. One counter-intuitive thing about these answer keys is that they are not designed for self-study in the way that commercial test prep books are. The Regents scoring rubrics are intentionally sparse. They list the acceptable responses but do not explain why a particular answer is correct or why a particular reasoning path fails. If you are using the January 2020 Regents Answer Key to understand where you went wrong on a constructed response, you will find yourself stuck more often than not. The rubric might say "accept 2.5 to 3.5 kg" for a calculation question, and if your answer falls outside that range, it just gets marked wrong with no further explanation. Another nuance that people overlook: the NYSED sometimes updates a scoring key after the initial release if they discover an ambiguity in a question. I noticed this once with the June 2019 Spanish Listening exam, where the initial key had an error that was corrected in a follow-up bulletin. The January 2020 exams did not have any post-release corrections that I am aware of, but the possibility exists for any administration. Before you grade a full class set of papers against a downloaded key, check the NYSED testing bulletin board for any addenda dated after the exam administration. It takes thirty seconds and prevents you from applying an incorrect standard.
The downsides are straightforward. The state does not provide an answer key for every single exam format variation. If your school used a alternate form — which happens occasionally for security reasons — the answer key you download will not match your version. You have to contact your district's testing coordinator to get the correct form number and the corresponding key. Also, the constructed-response scoring guidelines assume the grader has content expertise. A student going through this alone will not always know whether their written explanation meets the threshold for full credit, because the rubric uses phrasing that sounds precise but is actually quite broad in practice. If you are a student or parent looking at this for review purposes, I would recommend pairing the January 2020 Regents Answer Key with the official exam booklet itself, which is also available on the NYSED site. Going through each question, comparing your response to the scoring criteria, and then checking the multiple-choice answers in sequence gives you the most complete picture of performance. Doing this for one full exam takes about forty-five minutes. It is more thorough than looking at an answer sheet and moving on, and it is the method I kept coming back to with the students I worked with.
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