End to thesis requirement sets us one step back

By Jennie Siat

JAKARTA (JP): The recent decision of two major education institutions to drop the prerequisite of writing a thesis as part of a degree conferral has astonished many people.

It has long been an important tradition in Indonesia for college students to write a thesis to sum up their studies during their college years as a testament of one's reasoning power. From April this year, this tradition has been wiped out at University of Indonesia and IKIP Teachers Training Institute.

What impact will it have on college graduates in the future?

It would be interesting to discover why high school graduates enter college nowadays. The most probable reason of the majority would be: "to get a good job with a degree". In other words, they are degree hunters. Only a tiny number of idealists will enter college in order to acquire as much knowledge as possible or to improve their reasoning power.

For the idealists, a thesis plays a role of paramount importance in fulfilling their need to enrich themselves logically, mentally, psychologically and academically. The purpose of a thesis is essential to their quest for higher education. Without using their reasoning power in the earlier stages, students may find it hard to accomplish more in-depth studies, researches, and developments of thesis or dissertation in later stages.

There is an old saying: one can do it because one is accustomed to do it. The sooner one learns to develop the power of reasoning, such as developing a formal thesis, the better one will be able to cope with the later stages of higher education which require more reasoning power to perform a series of analysis.

On the other hand, for those who consider themselves degree hunters, a thesis does not have any purpose at all, other than as an official final stage of their college studies. Ironically, these degree hunters are a majority. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon to discover that degree hunters might also produce theses of high quality depending on the quality of their power of reasoning, rather than on their actual reason for going to college.

In spite of their reasoning capacity, the quality of a thesis is, to some extent, influenced by a student's actual reason for attending college. Of course, we should not presume that degree hunters produce low quality thesis. But isn't it quite understandable that to most degree hunters a passing grade is sufficient? In situations like this, what do we expect from a thesis?

Though the termination of the requirement to write a thesis makes no difference to most college students, it does place us one step backwards. Colleges and universities are supposed to be centers of excellence, where new generations, despite their reasons, are given the opportunity to develop themselves physically, psychologically, mentally, logically and academically.

Without the need to write a thesis, do we give college students any alternatives to develop their reasoning power or offer them the chance to become idealists? Where are we headed, without those idealists?

The writer is an alumnus of University of Indonesia and an observer of business law and education.