The rubrics are not published, and the first cohort under the new rules is already in middle school.

What the Regents did on September 14, 2026

The Department’s release of that day says the Board of Regents authorized it to move forward with the next phase of NY Inspires: a single New York State high school diploma in place of the local, Regents, and Advanced Designation diplomas, with the Advanced Designation becoming a seal or endorsement. Beginning with students graduating in 2028, students will no longer be required to pass a prescribed set of Regents examinations to graduate; the examinations continue as statewide measures of achievement, and federal law still requires statewide high school assessments in English language arts, mathematics, and science. The Department will advance proposed regulatory amendments to the Board by February 2027 to implement the changes in the 2027-28 school year. The same release says districts and schools “will develop local assessment strategies that draw on multiple sources of evidence, including classroom assessments, student work, performance-based learning experiences, educator observations, and State assessments,” and that initial guidance, a template, and a webinar are out (the Department’s release).

How it got here

July 14, 2025. The Board of Regents adopted the New York State Portrait of a Graduate (the Department’s release). The Department’s own description names six attributes a graduate will be: Academically Prepared, A Creative Innovator, A Critical Thinker, An Effective Communicator, A Global Citizen, and Reflective and Future Focused (the Department’s page on the attributes). Chalkbeat reported the same day that the exams would stop being a graduation requirement beginning in the 2027-28 school year, that students would still take some exit exams under federal rules without needing a passing score, and that the Class of 2031 would be the first group under new credit requirements (Chalkbeat, July 14, 2025).

June 15, 2026. The Department announced a competency-based diploma. Its release says that students “will demonstrate readiness through evidence of learning developed over time,” names capstone projects, interdisciplinary project-based learning, and career-connected learning as the experiences that produce that evidence, and says: “The Department will establish statewide performance standards, common rubrics, quality assurance processes, and accountability measures to ensure consistency and rigor across New York State,” and quotes Commissioner Betty A. Rosa on “demonstrated readiness rather than accumulated seat time” (the Department’s release; NYSSBA’s report of the meeting is at NYSSBA, June 29, 2026). New York Focus’s report of the same meeting quotes Deputy Commissioner Angelique Johnson-Dingle on why current transcripts fall short and says graduates would receive a “universal transcript or learner profile,” with the state expected to release its drafts of learning standards, competency rubrics, and the transcript within the next year (New York Focus, June 19, 2026). That phrase and that timeline are the report’s account of the meeting; neither appears in the Department’s release, and this page does not treat them as a Department commitment.

The timeline by cohort

Each row names its source. Where two reports describe the same cohort in different words, both are given.

The reading that matters for planning: the Class of 2031 is in eighth grade in 2026-27. The regulations that govern its diploma are due before the Board in February 2027, and the rubrics that will score its evidence are not published.

What the state will publish, and what a district decides

The state has said in its own releases that it will publish statewide performance standards, common rubrics, quality assurance processes, and accountability measures (the June 15 release); the proposed regulatory amendments, by February 2027 (the September 14 release); and changes to the federal accountability plan, which the same release says come before the Board later this fall. Beyond the releases, New York Focus’s report of the June meeting says the state is reworking learning standards, competency rubrics, and a universal transcript and is expected to release the drafts within the next year; that is the report’s account, and the Department has not put a date on those drafts in its own text.

The state has said a district decides its local assessment strategy, drawing on the multiple sources of evidence the September 14 release lists: classroom assessments, student work, performance-based learning experiences, educator observations, and State assessments. New York Focus reports that the Department encouraged districts to design pilot programs for next school year around hands-on learning outside the classroom, a wider range of ways to assess learning, and career-related opportunities. Which capstones, internships, and performance tasks a school runs, who supervises each one, and how the evidence is kept and shown are local decisions in every version of the plan published so far.

What no document has settled is the shape of the evidence itself: what a record of a capstone or a defense has to contain so that a reader who was not in the room, a year or four years later, can tell what happened and who saw it.

What a district can do this year without waiting

A rubric is a lens. It is applied to evidence, and it can be applied to the same evidence again when the draft changes, which it will, more than once, between now and 2029. What cannot be reconstructed later is the evidence a rubric needs to read: who did what, when, witnessed by whom, in a form anyone can check. A district that records those three things now, for every performance task, capstone, defense, and placement it runs this year, has evidence that survives every draft. A district that waits for the rubric records nothing in the meantime, and the eighth graders keep moving.

Recording it well means three properties, and none of them needs the state’s rubric to exist.

• Who did what. A dated entry with a title and a plain description: the capstone, the paper, the defense, the internship, the performance task. Sealed so its bytes cannot change afterward.
• Witnessed by whom. A named adult who was there puts their name, their role, and a sentence in their own words on that entry, and the record says how far that adult’s identity was checked. Where the witness disagrees with the school’s grade, both are shown.
• Verifiable anywhere. A public link any college, employer, or program can open with no account, and a published verifier that checks the same thing with no server at all. The student keeps the copy when they change schools, when the district changes systems, and when the state changes formats.

This is what the record does today. A school that issues on it declares each course-shaped row, a capstone included, with its title, term, grade, and credit, and the teacher who supervised it co-signs from an emailed link. The family seals work samples and invites the adults who were there to sign them. Every row and every sample verifies at one public link. The next page in this series, documenting Portrait evidence, walks through the six attributes one at a time, and what a universal transcript must hold sets the three properties against the open standard so a state process can check them.

A public school district, a charter school, or a BOCES does not enroll through the self-serve terms a microschool uses. A public agency’s agreement is drafted with counsel, and the place to start is a letter to hello@eformogi.com. How a school issues on the record is on the issuer page, and the price list is on the pricing page.

How a school issues on the record

What this page does not claim

• It does not say the state has adopted any format. The state has described what its transcript is for and said its drafts are coming. Nothing here reads that as an endorsement of anything, ours included.
• It does not speak for a receiver. Whether a record satisfies a college, an employer, or a program is that receiver’s decision. Where it matters we quote the receiver’s own published policy.
• It is not legal advice. A district’s obligations to its students and its contractors are questions for its lawyer, and ours.

Frequently asked questions

The state is a lens, not the identity

The conviction underneath this page is plain: a record of learning belongs to the learner, and every jurisdiction that reads it, New York included, reads it through a lens that is versioned, dated, and replaceable. The lens will change more than once between now and the Class of 2033. The record should not have to. That is why the format is published at eformogi.com/spec under a license anyone may implement, why a state’s rules are a plugin in that standard rather than its core, and why the learner holds the record and takes it with them. The promises behind that are written down in the sovereignty contract.

See also: documenting Portrait evidence · what a universal transcript must hold · the Portrait page · how a jurisdiction becomes a plugin