Ministry plans to review exam scoring system

P.C. Naommy, Jakarta

Coming under fire for its controversial grade conversion system, the Ministry of National Education is now planning to review and revise its formula for calculating national averages of final examination scores from schools throughout the country.

The ministry has been inundated with protests from education experts, teachers, and students who have questioned the validity and fairness of the formula and how it affects the standings of schools nationwide.

"We quite understand that the conversion system is not yet ideal, therefore we need to review it. We don't want students to feel that they are being disadvantaged or being given special privileges due to the statistical arrangement of the scores," said Dodi Nandika, the head of the research and development division at the Ministry of National Education on Tuesday.

Dodi added that the review was needed to prevent people from getting the wrong impression of the purpose of the scoring system. The formula is a tool used to interpret the deviations in local exam scores in various regions.

For example, he explained, a score of eight in exams for Papua province would have a different significance from a grade eight in exams designed for Jakarta.

The formula allows the calculation of a mean score that takes the various regions into account and provides comparative figures for more accurate evaluation of the actual status of the schools in terms of national standards.

"The disparity in the quality of national education that still exists in the country has forced us to design examination packages of varying degrees of difficulty. That's why we need to convert the scores for more comparable results, so we can make national interpretations out of the diversity," said Dodi.

Dodi clarified that even if there were different degrees of difficulty in exams between several province and schools, the scope of the test material and the focus of the exams remained the same.

Head of the Education Research Center Bahrul Hayat rejected rumors that the ministry had imposed the scoring system as a tool to minimize the number of students who failed the exams.

"The score conversion formula was made long before the UAN started and was based on exam tryouts held by the ministry in seven different provinces to get input on the students' performance in those provinces," said Bahrul.

Education experts called the scoring system "an 'assassination' of the students' intellectual ability, because it lowered the scores of students who could correctly answer more than 50 percent of the test questions, while on the other hand, has raised the scores of students who answered less than 50 percent of the questions.

Teachers and schools also complained that the use of the formula could impact the national standing of schools because it could decrease the average score achieved by a given school.

Teachers said that the drop in the average score would ruin the image of the schools, because most people would think that their performance had deteriorated.

Bahrul said that the score conversion would not lower the ranking of students or schools. "Their ranks remain the same, but the scale of the score has become narrower because of the conversion," he added.