50 schools to hold makeup exams

JAKARTA (JP): Students at 50 senior high schools in the city will have to take a makeup examination next week after the leaks of last week's nationwide final examination (Ebtanas), an official said on Tuesday.

"We will hold the makeup examination at 50 schools, among others, state senior high schools SMUN 55, SMUN 71 and SMUN 100 where we found higher deviations compared to results of the students' daily tests," head of Jakarta office of the Ministry of Education and Culture Alwi Nurdin said.

"Most of the schools are located in East, South, and West Jakarta. The students at these schools will undergo a makeup examination next Monday," he added.

The office determined that students who were implicated in making use of the leaked test data would undergo makeup examinations from Monday until Thursday, along with the one for students who failed to show up for the initial exam.

He said the subjects to be retested would be different from one school to another.

"We found most leaks were from test copies for mathematics, physics and English," he said.

Alwi also accused several other learning institutions (popularly known as Bimbingan Belajar) as leaking the test copies to its participants.

It wasn't the first time the institutions have been accused of leaking test copies. The leaks allegedly occurred not only at the final examination, but also at the enrollment test for state universities (UMPTN).

The institutions said they had kept track of past examinations and learned of changing trends.

"This way we can predict the questions for the next tests. Usually our predictions are 80 to 90 percent correct," was the typical answer given by the institutions.

Separately, Minister of National Education Yahya Muhaimin blamed officials at the Ministry's Jakarta office for the leaks.

"The city's education bureaucracy is still a mess, being unable to hold and supervise the examination properly," he told reporters.

"I will evaluate the examination procedures for all schools as it needs a large amount of funds and is prone to irregularities such as the leaks," he added.

The minister, however, said the nationwide examination was still needed at high school levels to standardize the results.

"We are still investigating where the leaks happened. If any ministry officials were involved in the scam, I will ask them to step down," he said. (08/nvn)