Question Clusters, NY Regents Exams for Science

This page describes how new Regents exam questions are handled by Problem-Attic. It is written primarly for science teachers in New York, but the information will be useful to teachers in other states (in all subject areas) who want to create assessments or instructional materials with questions in “clusters”.

Background

In spring 2024, sample question clusters were released by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) for new science learning standards. These covered Earth & Space Science and Biology. More sample clusters were released in the fall and then later for Chemistry and Physics. Starting in June 2025, this type of question began appearing on Regents Exams.

Problem-Attic’s database has all of the questions just described. As of this writing, the database is current through January 2026. The questions are freely available to registered users. You can view and select questions from the new science exams the same as any others. Any stimulus that goes with the questions will be added to your document automatically. For further instructions, see our help page for question banks or take the Problem-Attic tour.

Notes:

• The bank called NY Regents Biology is where you’ll find the new Life Science exams. We realize the content is very different from the old curriculum which ended in 2001, but the exams are separated by tabs, so you won’t mix them up by mistake. When the number of Life Science: Biology exams is large enough for a new bank, we’ll split them off.

[Biology panel > tabs]

• When you select questions from a bank, you can think of Problem-Attic as doing the cutting and pasting into a document. If you would prefer starting with a document which is “pre-built” and which replicates a Regents science exam, we’ve provided links below. Notably, we’ve also divided the documents up into clusters.

While the method of selecting questions is no different than before, even if they start out in clusters, there are important differences when it comes to document structure and formatting. Here’s why: in the past, it was possible to select exam questions from the database in just about any order. If there was shared stimulus, Problem-Attic would pull it in for the first question in a series. With clusters, the order matters, and stimulus has to be pulled in for particular questions instead of the whole group.

Given the above, you can make best use of clusters if you know about a few options on the Arrange and Format pages in Problem-Attic.

Document Parts

By default, all Problem-Attic documents have one part. It has no visible effect—you can pretty much ignore the default part—unless you change its formatting options or create additional parts.

For newer-style science questions, you will probably want each cluster to be in its own part. Besides giving your document a logical structure, there are several advantages:

• You can add your own directions to parts.
• You can move, cut and merge parts and do “nesting” for multiple part levels.
• Parts can be used to hold stimulus or reading passages. We call this elevating from the problem level.
• Formatting options and properties can be set for parts instead of a whole document or individual problems.

It is easy to create parts with the Add Part button. To move problems between them, click on a problem number in the document tree (to the left) and drag it to a new location. The next section describes a shortcut—a semi-automatic way of adding a part and moving questions at the same time.

Select Options button

Instead of moving questions one-at-a-time, it’s possible to multi-select them and, with just a few mouse clicks, create a new part and move questions at the same time.

To multi-select, be sure you’re looking at Grid (not Details) view. Simply hold down the Control key and click on question “thumbnails”. You’ll see a blue border when they’re selected. Or, to get a continuous range of questions, which will be common for clusters, hold down the Shift key and click the first and last.

After questions are selected:

1. click the Select Options button
2. choose “Move Selected...” in the dropdown menu
3. choose “New part” in the dialog
4. click the Move button

That’s it! You will see a new part was added to the end of your document and the selected questions are in it. You can return to the original part by clicking on it in the document tree. Then you can repeat the above steps for other questions until your document is properly divided up.

Formatting

There are numerous formatting options for a document with parts. On Arrange, you can click a Part icon in the document tree, then click the Details button. You’ll see options for setting problem properties (workspace, etc.) and inserting different kinds of answer spaces .

If you go to the Format page, there are additional options which are “document wide”. On the Parts & Numbering tab you can control the labeling of parts, styling of directions and, perhaps most importantly, numbering of questions. After you create parts, you can decide whether to restart numbering for each part or whether it should be continuous for a whole document. (Normally a document will start at number 1, but you can change that.)

Document Links

As mentioned above, you can select whatever questions you like from released exams and use them in a Problem-Attic document. If you want to reproduce a Regents exam, you can skip the selection steps and simply open a copy of a document that we’re already created. It will have all questions from the exam and, even better, they’ll already be separated into parts which correspond to each cluster. To learn how to share your own documents with links, see this help page. To merge and split documents or move questions between them, use the feature called My Documents.

NY Regents sample clusters and science exams