Over 7% of students fail exams
Leony Aurora, Jakarta
Envelopes with senior and vocational high school final examination results have already been delivered -- most of the recipients cheered their passing scores, but a few likely wept after failing.
The final examination results for Jakarta students were better this year, compared to last, with only 7.26 percent of the 126,259 students failing, head of Jakarta Middle and High School Education Agency Margani Mustar told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
The figure is far lower than the 2003 results, in which 16 percent failed.
"People's fears that more students would fail the new passing grade of 4.01 were unfounded," he said.
A few months ago, newspapers buzzed with debates on whether it was wise to increase the passing grade of 3.01, on a scale between 0 and 10, to 4.01 this year. Students must attain just over 40 percent in each subject to pass and become eligible to enter a university.
The Ministry of National Education drafted the national final exams tests for three subjects -- English, Bahasa Indonesia and Mathematics -- while the schools did the rest. This year was the second time the government applied such a method of evaluation.
Margani said that vocational high schools students' success rate rocketed to 93.22 percent of 59,582 students taking the test as compared to 68.13 percent last year.
"They must have learnt from their experiences last year," he said.
The students who failed will still get a second chance on repeat tests to be held from July 8 to July 10. Last year, the second-chance tests halved the number of failed students.
Preliminary evaluations revealed that private school students performed worse than public school students, asserted Margani. The number of private school students who failed the examinations reached 13.01 percent, while the figure for public schools was just 1.90 percent.
To deal with that problem, the agency plans to continue providing contract teachers as well as more teacher training at private schools, as it did last year.
"It is difficult to empower private schools, as there are too many of them and their conditions differ greatly from one to the other," said Margani.
There are currently 374 private high schools and 116 public high schools in Jakarta, as well as 531 private vocational schools and 58 public.
The agency said that this year, it would give new accreditation ratings to private schools. It will assign either A, B, C, or D -- with A being the highest -- for some 200 private high schools to replace the previous status, which were just listed as equal to public schools if they were given accreditation.
"Students from schools with an A or B accreditation can transfer to public schools," said Margani.
Last year the agency accredited 180 private high schools.