A Baldwin High School student scored a perfect 100 on his Chemistry Regents exam this past June, cashing in on a bet his teacher has offered students for a quarter century.
Jojo Yawson’s exam was the last one graded in teacher Anthony Simonelli’s pile. When the score came back, Simonelli says he could hardly believe it.
“When it came back with 100, my jaw almost hit the floor. Literally the last kid,” Simonelli told CBS New York Friday.
For 25 years, Simonelli has offered the same deal to his students: ace the Chemistry Regents, widely considered the toughest Regents-level exam in New York, and he’ll hand-deliver a $100 bill to your front door.
“I said, all right, here’s some motivation. I’ll give you 100 bucks. Any kid who gets 100,” he told CBS New York.
Yawson, a sophomore at the time, took the challenge seriously and broke it down to basics.
“I definitely believed it was possible,” he told the Long Island Herald. “You know, you just have to get all the questions right. Like, it’s not impossible.” “It’s mostly about just being very careful and not making any mistakes,” he added. “That’s the hard part.”
After walking out of the exam, Yawson figured he’d blown it.
“I thought I did terrible. I went home dejected. I thought, I don’t know, I thought I missed at least a few questions,” he said.
He hadn’t. Yawson aced every part of the test, and Simonelli made good on the bet, delivering a $100 bill engraved with “Thank you” and his own signature.
“It did matter a lot. It wasn’t in the back of my mind, it was in the front of my mind,” Yawson said of the money. “Of course, it’s about the money,” he added. “Getting a perfect score — if they gave me $100 for getting a 50, I would have got a 50. It’s about the money.”
Yawson toyed with framing the bill, but says he might just spend it, pointing out it’s not even his first Regents 100 — he also aced the Biology Regents as a freshman.
Yawson’s mother, Ama Karikari, said she’s proud of her son for hitting perfect scores while using the learning accommodations he needs for testing.
“I believe that it should really inspire students with accommodations and their families to recognize that having a learning difference can mean learning with excellence,” Karikari told the outlet.
The exam itself is on its way out
Yawson’s perfect score may be one of the last of its kind. New York is phasing out the Chemistry Regents in its current form as it redesigns testing under the state’s P-12 Science Learning Standards, and the state is eliminating Regents exams as a diploma requirement altogether by 2028.
“There’s no way that the last kid that I’ll ever have the chance to have a 100 literally did it,” Simonelli said.
Former Gov. George Pataki has criticized the state’s move away from Regents testing as a requirement for graduation.
“Getting rid of the Regents is incredibly stupid,” Pataki told The Post last week. “It seems like the Education Department’s main function right now is to disguise the fact that too many New York State schools are failing to educate our kids,” he said. “So instead of doing the appropriate testing so that corrective measures could be taken to improve [performance], they simply get rid of the tests to hide their failure.”
