Govt plan to abandon national exam lauded
Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government's plan to scrap the national exams for elementary schools (Ebtanas) has received a thumbs-up from both teachers and education experts, pointing out that the existing system is redundant, misleading and prone to corruption.
Noted education observer Mochtar Buchori along with an executive from the Federation of Indonesian Independent Teachers, Sonny Sumarsono, argued that the government's idea to entrust each school to run its own exams will empower both the teachers and the schools.
They said that the national exam failed to monitor the quality of the education program and curriculum, and it was instead turned into a cash-cow for certain unscrupulous administrators, wherein students were forced to pay exam "fees" in order to pass the test, enabling them to go on to junior high school.
"Ebtanas is a redundant program because the schools have the authority to issue diplomas enough for reference to get higher education. It has become a commodity since it creates opportunities for bribery in order to get the passing marks.
"Moreover, such a nationalized examination reduces the teachers' creativity in transferring knowledge because they are forced to strictly adhere to the curriculum to be evaluated on the exams, and basically ignoring the students' ability," Mochtar said on Thursday.
Minister of National Education Abdul Malik Fajar revealed on Wednesday the plan to eliminate Ebtanas for elementary schools in relation with the nine-year compulsory education program and will simplify the centralized exams for junior high students.
The nine-year compulsory education program, which was enacted in 1994, for school age children between seven years old and fifteen comprises the six-year elementary education and another three years at junior high schools.
In the existing system, students of elementary, junior high and high schools have to take the national exams which were launched in 1983 in order to obtain leaving marks as their reference to enroll with favorite schools.
The system was initially designed to be a tool to evaluate the national education program by measuring how well the students had memorized the nationally-mandated curriculum, some of which has proven to be historically inaccurate, particularly the cases of the alleged coup in 1965 and East Timor's occupation.
However, as Sonny put it, the evaluation turned out to be a standard to measure the students' progress in classes, "where education is evaluated based on how well the students answer the multiple choice questions and not on other aspects such as their experience and comprehension."