Quality, validity important in exam

Simon Marcus Gower, Jakarta

The national tests for schools in Indonesia seem to be a perennial source of concern and even conflict. Debate swings between the ideas that the government here wants to enter into a process of recentralization, and the rights of teachers and schools to exercise greater autonomy in assessing their students' efforts. All of this leaves an unhappy predicament with students stranded in the middle.

The grim reality, most likely, is that students and the education system of Indonesia are not being best served if there is effectively a power struggle going on for control. Also, it simply must be realized that quality is not a product of the process of 'standardization'. Standardization without sufficient and appropriate reference to standards ends up being fairly worthless and is, effectively, a vicious circle of no progress.

The apparent process or claim towards standardization is partly predicated on the notion that across Indonesia schools ought to be achieving some degree of parity of educational outcomes and achievement but this whole argument is almost inevitably rendered fallacious with even the merest and most basic of assessments of what is actually happening across Indonesia.

For example, the idea of having a degree of standardization for the learning of the English language can hardly stand up to scrutiny of the range and diversity of learning experiences that Indonesian students can have. A student in a high school in Jakarta can conceivably benefit from exposure to native speaker teachers of the language and access to quite a range of literature and media in the English language.

In the meantime, it is possible to meet students in more distant provinces of the nation that actually complain that they can rarely have direct contact with native speakers and the literature or paper-based material available to them is far more limited. For these students any exposure to native speakers can often be limited to chance meetings with tourists visiting their part of the country.

Inevitably this immediately and directly creates something of an 'unfair advantage' for those students that benefit from big city residence. Indeed students in high schools in Jakarta can be met who have a sufficient degree of English language competence to allow them to offer critiques of the quality of English that they are required to respond to in 'standardized' tests.

A lack of parity does, then, immediately challenge or even undermine any notion of standardization leading to improving quality and standards. But it is also of value to consider what kinds of tests are actually being prepared for and so implemented in Indonesian schools. Consistently the tests which students are being prepared for are multiple-choice in nature and this too can leave the whole process looking weak.

Multiple-choice testing can be convenient and time saving for teachers and examiners but does it really determine the academic strengths and/ or weaknesses of the students? Such testing cannot possibly create opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding. Multiple-choice questioning does create a condition in which the answer is actually before the students and they simply must find it.

Far more challenging and even enriching testing can and does exist in which the students are required to show and/ or demonstrate their own thinking and understanding of the subjects before them. With this kind of testing in place a better standard of teaching is also likely to emerge because teachers have to encourage and guide their students towards thinking skills.

Originality and independence of thought are then being targeted and this kind of objective is far more valid and legitimate in the pursuit of standards. Standards cannot really effectively be imposed, rather they need to be nurtured and supported in a way that encourages the students to take initiative and responsibility into their own hands. This should be at the core of what the education system is aiming to do.

This simultaneously highlights the essential ingredient of having educational objectives that are valid and worthwhile for education professionals too. The practically blind and dictatorial imposition of standardized tests does little to encourage the development of teachers; they are simply required to follow what is handed down to them and any degree of autonomy and freedom to develop is either totally precluded or, at best, significantly marginalized.

Certainly the setting of standards and identifying criteria for graduation of students is appropriate but these things need to be part of a larger and more detailed educational package. For any education system to target and hopefully attain targets it must work within the context of the community in which it is applied and significantly this must reference the local context in which it is active.

But any system of education, if it is to attain sophistication and quality, has to work to an agenda of not merely preparing students to robotically pass tests. A good system of education is preparing students to be participants in the wider world of both their society and their future careers.

In this sense, then, the debates, the doubts and the perennial questions that exist about national tests really should be placed in the context of more thoughtful considerations of what schools in Indonesia really ought to be achieving. Mundane, uninspired and uninspiring tests that impose requirements of conformity and offer little scope to show true understanding have to be considered as questionable in their value and indeed validity.

It is far more constructive for educators to think about the things that they would wish for students to be able to achieve and do having attended so many years of formal education and learning. Rote memorization and quite naively following the knowledge handed down from either centralized examiners or teachers seems unlikely to achieve the kinds of graduates that are desirable.

Educators and examiners ought to be seeking to encourage students that have the capacity to enquire, show initiative, be inventive, problem-solve, make predictions and proposals based on their thinking and be critical and active thinkers. These kinds of learning objectives and outcomes can be engendered by appropriate vehicles for testing; but testing alone cannot create standards. The teaching that leads into testing is where real standards are achieved and therefore any "struggle" or "development" in testing must closely relate to what and how students are taught and learn; then true standards may emerge.

The writer is an education consultant.