Exam board to stop excising literary passages

The New York state education commissioner announced in June that administrators of the Regents exams, which public high school students in the state must pass in order to graduate, would no longer edit literary passages and excise potentially offensive words. The practice was widely criticized after it was discovered by the parent of a New York high school student and publicized by the New York Times. After noticing that a passage attributed to an author with whom she was familiar did not match that author's published work, the parent, Jeanne Heifetz, systematically compared literary passages used in ten recent Regents exams with the originals, and found that the majority had been altered, and that in only one case was the alteration noted. Heifetz then contacted affected authors and publishers, finding that for the most part they had not given permission for the alterations.

The state education board acknowledged that the passages had been altered in accordance with sensitivity guidelines designed to prevent students from feeling uncomfortable while taking the tests. But critics, including several of the authors cited, charged that the alterations were so extensive as to strip the literary passages of their sense. According to a letter sent to the education commissioner by the National Coalition Against Censorship, references to Judaism were stripped from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, although Judaism is a main theme of his writing, and references to race were deleted from a passage by Annie Dillard in which she recounts how her sense of social justice was awakened by childhood visits to a public library at which she was one of very few white patrons. In other examples cited by the coalition, the word "skinny" was changed to "thin," "fat" was changed to "heavy," and "gringo" was changed to "American." The AAUP is a participating institution in the coalition.

The state education board said that, while it will no longer change the authors' words, passages will still be edited for length.