End to thesis requirement sets us one step back

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.