Published: June 25, 2005 | By OLIVIA WINSLOW | Newsday

High school students who failed the Math B Regents Exam this week can look forward to higher scores, after the state Education Department announced yesterday afternoon they were rescoring the test following complaints of its difficulty.

"We're correcting it," said Tom Dunn, a department spokesman.

The department said in a statement that after a review of the "difficulty level" of the exam, it will issue a "conversion chart" that will lead to a new scaled score for students.

Leslie Speed of Huntington, a parent of a 10th-grader at Harborfields High School, was elated. "Kudos to the state," Speed said. "They are taking care of this in a timely manner ... This has just made my summer."

She said her daughter, Shannon, 16, studied hard for the test and was upset over her 60 score, below the 65 passing score. According to the conversion chart, a raw score of 60 would be converted into a 76.

Earlier, Speed was among those who had contacted Newsday complaining about the test. She said her daughter had "worked so hard on the math. They made it impossible for her to pass." She said she heard similar complaints from others.

And a few school administrators reached yesterday, the last day of school for most districts, acknowledged higher than normal failure rates on the exam.

If Speed's daughter had failed, she would have had to go to summer school and retake the test in August.

Harborfields Schools Superintendent Raymond McCloat said failure rates on the test, which covers such areas as Algebra II and advanced geometry, were "higher than the norm," though he would not say how much. "They're up from last year, that's for sure ... I don't know why."