NORWICH – Department chairs took the floor with graphs and charts at last week’s Norwich school board meeting, presenting Regents scores for the fall semester.

English Department Chair Betty Moubray said of the 65 students who took the English Language Arts Regents in January, 97 percent passed and 46 percent earned a mastery level of greater than 85 percent on the exam.

While Moubray said the students did better than last year, she is still computing statistics to look at the breakdown of grades and trying to track individual students’ success rates. While grading the exam, Moubray said the trend among students was that many struggled with the reading content portion of the test. “The students showed difficulty when it came to the essays and multiple choice questions which correspond,” she said.

Social Studies Department Chair Linda Callea said students taking the Global Studies Regents exam showed a 56 percent passing rate, and of the 57 students who took the United States History and Government exam, a passing rate of 91 percent was achieved.

“Most students will take the Global History Two exam in the spring, and the numbers of students examined will be much more,” said Callea.

In math, Department Chair Susanne Fenton said Math Course A and B sequences get placed in students’ schedules in their freshman and sophomore years if possible. Due to the semestering of high school schedule, the math courses are divided into A1 and A2, B1 and B2. “Math A is required for graduation and Math B is required for an advanced Regents diploma,” she said.

Fenton said 73 students took the Math A Regents in January. A 95.89 percent passing rate was reached, showing a 4.11 percent failure rate and 53.42 percent mastery rate (indicating five students scored between 90 and 100). Fenton said the students’ scores reflected problem areas that were spread out, and although she could not pinpoint an exact question that seemed to be problematic for all, she said word problems that either have too much or too little information appeared to cause the most difficulty.