Exam scores conversion could produce dilettantes

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.