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Glitch May Delay Some NYC Graduating Seniors From Getting Diploma On Time

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Graduation day has arrived for some New York City high school seniors, but some students may not get their diplomas on time because of an issue with the new Regents exam grading system.

The city awarded McGraw-Hill a $10 million contract to collect, scan and send the Regents exams to graders electronically. But the system has been exceedingly slow, some teachers said.

"Every day that we've come in, there's been some kind of slowdown with the system," a Brooklyn teacher told WCBS 880's Marla Diamond. "We did a maximum of two hours of scoring and after that, there just wasn't any more available."

Glitch May Delay Some NYC Graduating Seniors From Getting Diploma On Time

The state mandates a process called distributed grading, which prohibits teachers from grading their own students' Regents exams.

Grader Gregg Lundahl said he blames the Department of Education.

"You can experiment, and this administration has done that, the mayor has done that with a lot of things. But you don't experiment with kids lives, with their careers, with their futures," Lundahl told Diamond.

In response to the glitch, the DOE has asked principals to depart from common practice and allow seniors to take part in graduation even if their Regents results are not in yet.

A two-year pilot program between McGraw-Hill and a limited number of schools went well, according to the city. But full participation this year slowed the process down.

"The computers are blank, the lock out, they send us home, there's nothing to do. I mean, there is nothing we can do to help our kids," Lundahl, a social studies teacher at Washington Irving High School, added.

A DOE Spokeswoman said there's been a slight slowdown because of the volume of tests being scored but added they expect to have most, if not all, of them done by Monday.

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