Exam scores conversion could produce dilettantes

B. Herry-Priyono, Jakarta

A recent sluggish Monday morning turned into a mental inferno as my cellular phone was barraged by a series of messages from acquaintances: the statistical conversion of the 2004 national final examination results had flattened the "for each according to his/her own intellectual ability" ethos in education.

Shocked by what sounded like a rape of intelligence, I was thinking that the fuss might just be a rage in the heat of the moment.

But then, when I began inquiring into what the fuss was all about, I began to see the scale of the absurdity. The public has never known whether the national final examination (UAN) system was driven by the noble cause of improving educational standards or by the sheer pursuit of financial gain from organizing a lucrative project as big as the UAN. It seems futile to pin down the motive, for life always stands on a mixture of various, often contradictory, motives. Whatever the motive, we have the following absurdity.

Suppose you are a secondary school student. With or without angst, you have to take the final exam in order to graduate. Now, with shivering feelings you sit for a math exam. There are 40 problems on the paper you have to answer. Suppose you answer correctly 10 out of the 40 problems, or you get 75 percent incorrect.

According to strict standards, you would get a score as low as 2.50 and you would not pass (Kompas, June 15, 2004). But, as if by a play of magic, some angels working for the Ministry of National Education rescue you. Instead of keeping your score at 2.50 and failing you, the angels raise it to 4.01 and you pass. Bravo! This, of course, is simply one aspect of the absurdity surrounding the UAN, and the same magic also works for other subjects. How on earth did these angels change your score from 2.50 to 4.01? It is here where the problem begins.

The score difference is statistically taken, at random of course, from the high scores obtained by other pupils. As a student of social sciences once trained in statistics, I can see the glee of making a curve more elegant by taking some points from one numerical cluster and adding them to another. And if the statistics involve a public issue as crucial as the UAN, the finessed curve will be socially more palatable. It will give an impression that the UAN is a big success.

But certainly the delight of finessing the curve is beside the point. In any case, the mandarins at the Ministry of National Education could not have possibly done the finessing for sheer statistical delight. Then, for what reason? Bahrul Hayat from the ministry admitted the existence of this score conversion and said that it has been employed since 1995/1996 to "administer justice in grading students at the national level" (Kompas, June 15, 2004).

What? Justice? Do we mishear? We surely know that there is a yawning gap between the academic abilities of students at wealthy schools and those of their counterparts at poorly equipped schools in remote areas. We accept that this is part of the sorry state of education in Indonesia. To address the problem by employing score conversion at the national level, and in the name of justice, is completely amiss. It is not called justice but blunder. The rhetoric of justice being used to justify the conversion sounds lofty, but it is based on a rotten understanding of the most fundamental principle of education.

This time the problem befalls education, but in fact it mirrors what happens so often in many areas. When circumstances in our national life call for the application of a socially oriented principle (say, in regulating financial capital for stimulating the real economy), we instead apply a ruthless individualistic principle. Now, when circumstances call for the application of a personal-based criteria of evaluation (in education), we instead employ a tribal/communal yardstick.

The public outrage that has erupted is justified. No doubt the public will never learn the exact reasons for the score conversion. Indeed, the real motives of the mandarins at the education ministry will remain hidden. But there is no need to dig deep into their motives in order to feel outraged. The crux is clear: it is plainly wrong, illegitimate and unjustified to steal high scores from high achievers to compensate the low scores of poor achievers. The designers of this ill-fated score conversion may have been inspired by income redistribution in the political economy. The latter, however, is a completely different issue.

As in many gross mistakes, the implications of this ill-fated score conversion are far-reaching. First and most obvious is that it makes the poor achievers gleeful. But even for those with a noble concern for the poor, this surely is not what education is for. As for the high achievers, their laments feel like a pang. They have earned high scores with hard work. With this bizarre score conversion, a generation of students has been informed that hard work is not as important as they had been told.

Second, we do not know yet the extent to which this case has dire implications for individual students. But it is not difficult to foresee the risks involved for those who aspire to pursue further studies. It is not unusual for universities or tertiary institutes to impose minimum grade and score standards for applicants. This score conversion could be a curse on those who have to face this requirement.

Third, it is unpalatable to accept the ill-fated score conversion amid growing calls for competitiveness in the context of globalization. The competitive ethos does not fall from the sky, but needs to be built painstakingly from within all aspects of life. The bizarre score conversion is a way to stultify that transformation.

Last, the ill-fated UAN score conversion is like a cultural death wish to turn the nation's educational system into a circus. Like those lunatic television programs called Indonesian Idol and Akademi Fantasi Indosiar (AFI), it creates a hysteria for instant success at the expense of the formation of an ethos for substance and hard work. In brief, it is a shortcut to a future Indonesia as a nation of dilettantes.

The writer is head of the Postgraduate Academic Program at the Driyarkara School of Philosophy, Jakarta.