Kompas (22/06/06): Is it true to consider the recent passing rate of the national examination astonishing? The National Board for Education Standards (BNSP) said the passing rate in SMA which reaches up to 92.50 % is a significant achievement compared to last year’s passing rate of 80,76 % (Kompas, 20/6).

While the National Board for Education Standards (BSNP) boasts that the soaring passing rate indicates the increasing quality of the national secondary education, as a teacher I want to voice questions raised by many students, how have those grades been treated? Are those grade purely based on the students’ achievement?

Faux grade

Amid the students’ euphoria, some of them are wondering about their fantastic scores. They do not feel that they have solved all the problems perfectly but they get 10 (perfect score). Some of them, who earlier predicted that they would get 3, ended up getting 5. Maybe many schools are stunned when they learnt about the scores that their students achieved which exceeded the result of quick count carried out during the examination. It might not be a coincidence if the discrepancies occurred in all of the students. What happened with the examination result?

The term "conversion" was introduced last year along with the announcement of the examination result, or in the early nineties the different ‘coefficients’ applied in various regions to determine students’ scores in national examination and graduation.

If something also happened to the result of the 2006 national examination, can we call it outstanding? Instead of increasing the education sector performance, what the National Education Ministry has done in the past year is to increase the passing grade from 4.25 to 4.50.

As a teacher, I felt disappointed seeing the faux pride exhibited by the policy–makers at the National Education Ministry who thought that they have done their job after setting the passing grade at 4.5; meanwhile, they do not seem to be bothered about the implementation of the national examination in the actual settings.

A wise man once said that the goal is (also) in the process. The pride of the result is also the pride of the process. If school buildings are still messy, curriculum is still disorganized, teachers professionalism are still lagging, what kind of systematic efforts have been done to improve education quality that have lead to the increasing passing grade?

From Gunung Kidul, maybe in other areas too, we discovered that most of the students who failed to graduate came from marginalized school.

Efforts to improve education are unequal, centered in urban areas; therefore we cannot compare students having enough access to education to those living in poor suburban areas. The result would be deceiving.

Next years’ final examination

If the head of the BSNP based his decision on the statistics (20/06), I am sure that there will be another national exam next year. Certainly, those who administer the national exam will base their arguments on the figures while they overlook the situation in the field which is far away from being “standardized.”
Efforts to set a standardized examination without any standardized process will only result in compromising and bargaining.

Many real problems have occurred in the field concerning unethical actions in the examination. Several teachers acknowledged (20/6) that there have been some cheating during the national examination, including teachers who deliberately let the students cheat, leaking answers through mobile phone text messages, and changing the students’ answer sheet. In several places teachers have deliberately let their students cheat, which prompted dispute between teachers and examination monitor’s officers.
Indonesian Corruption Watch said that the irregularities in the national examination are related to the schools’ principals and head of education agency’s prestige, thus the cheating was justified by the bureaucracy. Result of such a rampant cheating is certainly can’t be called outstanding!

St Kartono, teacher of De Britto College in Yogyakarta