Most Regents examinations are offered every January, June, and August. Most are normally scheduled to be taken in June, but some students do take them earlier in January; others have an extra opportunity to take them after summer school in August, or the following January, to make up for a previous exam failure.
Most Regents exams are three hours long. The exceptions are the Comprehensive English exam, the Earth Science exam, and foreign language exams. Comprehensive English consists of two separate three-hour exam periods over two consecutive days. Earth Science consists of a 41 minute (approximate) laboratory component usually given up to two weeks prior to the three hour written exam. The format of the Earth Science laboratory component is presently changing. Several of the foreign language Regents have oral exams which are administered before the written test and are not part of the three hour time limit.
Most Regents exams are structured in the following format:
* A multiple-choice section (Part I), which is usually between 30-50 questions, and,
* a long-answer/essay section (Part II), which consists of either a selection of detailed questions for which the work must be shown (for math and physical sciences), or a set of essay topics, of which one or two must be written about in detail (for the social sciences).
* Foreign language exams include a third section on listening skills (with passages read aloud by a proctor), and the history exams include a section of short responses (a sentence or two) on primary documents. For both social science exams, two essays are now required and students do not get a choice as to which essay to answer.
In 2005, the Board of Regents began modifying the Mathematics curriculum. An integrated approach that taught topics in geometry and algebra during each of three years, with exams normally taken after a year and a half and again after three years, was replaced by a curriculum that divides topics into Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. Each of these take the form of a one-year course with a Regents Examination at the end of the year. The "Math A" and "Math B" exams are thus being eliminated and replaced by "Integrated Algebra", "Geometry", and "Algebra II and Trigonometry".