Have you been listening to the Hell Gate Podcast? You can catch last week's episode here in audio and here in video.
I had a high school chemistry teacher whose fear and respect for the Regents exams was paramount.
Each class would begin with an admonition: "Man, the Regents man, you better be scared! You better get ready! Because man, the Regents, they're coming!"
He spoke of the Regents, the exams you had to pass to graduate from New York public high schools, with reverence, awe, and not an insubstantial amount of terror. We took him quite seriously—this teacher had dodged bullets in the Lebanese Civil War, and told us that when he came to the United States, he learned English by locking himself in a room with a dictionary (Honestly? I believe him).