[Kabar-indonesia] 4 JP Reports: Exam Fiasco [+Govt Stands Firm on Requirement]

[JoyoNews at aol.com]

4 JP Reports: 

- Who gets the failing grade in exam fiasco? 

- Govt stands firm on requirement for national 
  exam to graduate 

- Fraction of junior high students fail examination 

- Govt plans to recruit 210,000 new teachers 

The Jakarta Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Op-Ed

Who gets the failing grade in exam fiasco? 

B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta

The day of soul-searching has arrived again. The disaster burst on the 
morning of Monday, June 19, when the national exam results for senior high school 
students were announced. 

This is not a biblical apocalyptic story in which the first deservedly 
becomes the last and the last the first. Rather, it is a tale of a sleight of 
bureaucratic hand that made the first undeservedly the last, the last descend into 
limbo and left the rest stuck in a fiasco. 

As has been widely reported, it all started with a jumbled program to hold a 
standardized, national exam for all high school students across the country, 
regardless of the abysmal differences in terms of demographic characteristics 
found throughout Indonesia. On the surface, at least, there seemed to be a 
noble basis for pursuing the standardized test, but, as forewarned by many 
experienced and committed educators, noble intentions that lack social acumen are 
bound to result in disaster. 

As if in a bubble of self-congratulation, the education bureaucrats take 
pride in statistics, saying the passing rate for all high schools has risen 11.74 
percent, or from 80.76 percent in 2005 to 92.50 percent in 2006. It was 
clearly with a sense of pride that Bambang Suhendro, head of the National Education 
Standard Agency, said "the results reflect a significant improvement in the 
quality of national secondary education". To add insult to injury, Vice 
President Jusuf Kalla added to the farce by saying that allowing students to retake 
failed exams would be unfair to industrious students. 

One immediately wonders whether all these words come from people who really 
understand education. I don't think they do. When the fuss started a few years 
ago, it was quickly all too clear that the noble idea of holding a 
standardized national exam would not lift people up but would instead pull down the dream 
of improving the quality of secondary education. The reasons are obvious. 

The demographic, socioeconomic and sociocultural disparities between schools 
and students in each province are so stark that a one-size-fits-all exam is 
bound to flatten the differences. Demographic and socioeconomic disparities are 
important since they are closely related to the infrastructural conditions 
that affect differences in scholastic aptitude. 

This is certainly not meant to dignify the low quality schools that may have 
been the target of the standardized test policy. Nor is this an attempt to 
defend the lazy. Rather, these initial differences need to be addressed first 
before any attempt at standardization is made. 

To pursue the point further, this initial disparity is less the outcome of 
laziness than of long abandonment of primary and secondary education in 
Indonesia. If indeed education at the primary and secondary levels is decreed 
compulsory, the starkness of the demographic, socioeconomic and cultural differences 
themselves tells less about the socioeconomic conditions of the students or 
their families than about the consequences of this long abandonment. 

Second, it is true that these initial differences seem to have been partially 
addressed by differentiating the more from the less developed provinces. 
Students from a high school in a remote area in Nabire (West Papua) or Singkil 
(South Yogyakarta) were given a set of standardized tests different from their 
counterparts in Central Jakarta or Bandung in terms of its level of academic 
difficulty. 

But it is clear from what happened that this stratagem is still a continent 
too far from representing the rich diversity that actually exists. Add to this 
the strange policy of having just three subjects -- Math, Indonesian and 
English -- as the only benchmark for passing, and what we have is the present 
fiasco. 

Not only is a snap exam on these three subjects far too narrow to reflect the 
scholastic aptitude of high school students, but the squeezing of a 
three-year schooling process into a snapshot of three subjects is an ignorant way of 
managing national education. The net is too small for such a vast ocean. 

This point is crucial, as we are here dealing not with mature persons but 
with children and adolescents at a stage of life when they are searching and 
exploring. At the historical juncture of this country's development, nothing has 
destroyed their searching souls more fatally than what has been done to them 
through a poorly standardized exam. 

Many bright students who had already been admitted to best universities were 
crushed by the results, not because they were incapable but because the 
standardized test is too poor to measure their brilliance. For them, joy and 
laughter are over. As for many other students, it was a time for gross cheating, as 
many were given the wrong answers by their teachers. Other students still ran 
amok or, in extreme cases, committed suicide. 

But why is such a standardized exam possible in many countries, but not here? 
This is where Indonesia grossly errs. These countries have a long history of 
giving real attention to the basic infrastructure of primary and secondary 
education. Only after addressing the gap that exists between schools across the 
country did they gradually try to carry out a national standardized test. 

This is commonsense. And our problem seems not to lie in the commonsense, but 
in the way we fail to ignore it. We often think that because something is 
being done in more advanced countries, we must do it too, here and now. If that 
is the result of our studies in those advanced countries, then it is simply a 
form of uninformed mimicry. 

This tendency is not just found in education, but in other areas, too. For 
example, we zealously propagate a virtual economy without realizing that it has 
little do with the growth the real sector economy that is the concern of the 
majority of ordinary people. 

Indeed, if we are unable in the next five years to rebuild all the school 
buildings that collapsed over the past 10 years, we had better forget the dream 
of a standardized test, let alone the dream of taking the future generation of 
Indonesian to a global competition or an economy based on information 
technology. That, surely, would be lunacy. 

The writer is a lecturer in the Graduate Program of Driyarkara School of 
Philosophy, Jakarta. 

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The Jakarta Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Govt stands firm on requirement for national exam to graduate 

The Jakarta Post, Yogyakartra, Jakarta

Education Minister Bambang Sudibyo said Monday the government would not 
change the requirement for junior and high school students to pass the national 
exam to graduate, despite criticism it does not take into account overall 
academic performance. 

Bambang, speaking after the nationwide distribution of results of the junior 
high school exams, also said the government would not hold a remedial 
examination for students who failed. 

"The government's decision on the national examination policy is based on Law 
No. 20/2005 on national education. Those who are not satisfied with the 
policy could take the matter to court," he said after a meeting with the Regional 
Representatives Council. 

Consternation greeted the announcement of high school results last week, 
especially because the government discontinued the remedial exam this year. 

But an increased number of junior high school students passed the exam this 
year, the Education Ministry and National Board for Education Standards (BSNP) 
said. 

The number of junior high schoolers satisfying the 4.51 average for the 
English, Indonesian and math subjects -- including a grade of at least 4.26 on each 
of them -- increased from 87.07 percent last year to 92.03 percent. 

This means that nearly 250,000 of 3,008,938 students taking the exam 
nationwide failed. However, the students will be able to take the national exam for 
accredited nonformal schooling, locally known as "packet B", which is scheduled 
in November. 

"We recommend students who failed take the exam that is prepared for 
nonformal educations," BSNP head Bambang Suhendro said. "The packet B test is regarded 
as the same level of the junior high school national exam." 

Bambang said that students could take the packet B test at the education 
agencies in any province. The test is free of charge and is also available to 
adults who dropped out of school as an equivalency exam. 

Although Yogyakarta followed the trend with an overall higher rate of 
students passing the junior high school exam, several low-enrollment schools reported 
100 percent failure. 

Without disclosing the names of the schools, Yogyakarta education office 
chief Sugito said Monday the schools with zero pass rates had enrollment of from 
five to 10 students each. 

Kasio, head of the junior high school section of the Gunung Kidul education 
office, said the failing schools under his supervision were registered as 
junior high schools with an open education system. 

Of 17 open junior high schools in Gunung Kidul, for example, seven had all 
their students fail the exam, he said, or 128 of 237 students who did not 
graduate to high school. 

However, Kasio said that, "in general the level of students passing the exam 
in Gunung Kidul this year reached 84.71 percent. Out of 10,073, only 1,540 
failed the exam". 

Sugito also was satisfied with the result, as the pass rate in the province 
was 86.55 percent this year, up from only 80 percent last year. 

He explained that only 6,317 or 13.45 percent of 46,958 junior high school 
students were declared to have failed. 

The improvement in the number of students passing the exam was attributed to 
better preparation from public awareness campaigns. "The main factor to the 
improvement was the students' preparedness to face the exam," he added. 

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The Jakarta Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Fraction of junior high students fail examination 

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Only about 0.16 percent of all junior high school students in Jakarta failed 
to graduate Monday, a slight improvement from last year's failure rate of 0.42 
percent, the Education Ministry said.

City elementary education agency head Sylviana Murni said that four students 
from state junior high schools No. 252 and No. 255 in Duren Sawit, East 
Jakarta, Lab School in Rawamangun, East Jakarta, and the Marsudirini Catholic Junior 
High School in Matraman, East Jakarta, had received the highest grade in the 
national examination of 29.80 from a total of 30. 

Subjects tested at junior high school level are mathematics, Bahasa 
Indonesia, and English. 

The 191 students who failed to graduate this year will be given the chance to 
retake the exam in November, but will only be able to enter senior high 
school next year, Sylviana said in a text message received by The Jakarta Post. 

She said the remedial test was modeled from a test used by informal schools, 
and students would receive diplomas from the agency instead of their junior 
high schools. 

To avoid rowdy graduation traditions, the agency has also decided to mail 
examination results directly to parents. 

Lies Sartika, however, told the Post she did not receive her daughter's 
results by mail. She said her daughter's school, Lab School, had invited parents to 
come to the school. 

"We were informed the announcement would be at 9 a.m., but it was delayed by 
five hours," Lies said. 

She said that as of Monday evening, there were still many parents who had not 
received their children's results by mail. 

The pass rate of the junior high school national examination surpassed that 
of the high school national exam. 

Ninety-four percent of all senior high school students in Jakarta who took 
the national examination passed this year, an improvement on last year's 85 
percent. 

Most of the students who failed did poorly in math, but like the junior high 
school students those who failed will be given the opportunity to retake the 
exam and receive an agency high school diploma. 

-----------------------------------------

The Jakarta Post
Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Govt plans to recruit 210,000 new teachers 

JAKARTA: The government plans to make 210,600 teachers it has employed on 
temporary contracts into permanent civil servants, State Minister of 
Administrative Reforms Taufik Effendi said Monday.

"The teachers, who are employed as temporary employees in state and Islamic 
elementary and high schools nationwide, will be recruited without any 
obligation for them to undergo a selection process," he told a hearing with the House 
of Representatives' Commission X on education here Monday. 

The hearing was attended by Home Minister M. Ma'ruf and Education Minister 
Bambang Sudibyo. 

The commission approved the government's decision. 

Taufik said the government would also recruit 100,000 new teachers to replace 
those entering retirement age. --JP 

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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