Schools testing procedures need to be re-examined?

Simon Marcus Gower Principal High School Harapan Bangsa Tangerang, Banten

It seems like few people really like it. Teachers often complain that it imposes too many strictures on them that force them to teach too much too fast. More thoughtful and independently minded students recognize that certain areas and aspects of study prescribed by it are either of little relevance to them or are entirely misplaced in preparing them for our twenty-first century world.

Parents too express their dissatisfaction that their children must follow a program of study that they can see is deficient in a variety of ways. It cannot, then, really be seen as a surprise that there is now much talk of and even expectation that National Final Test (UAN) will be disregarded and assigned to become part of the history of Indonesia's developing education sector.

The frustrations are all too apparent to all those involved in Indonesian schools on a daily basis. Educationally and academically UAN is consistently viewed as being circumspect. The need for room and freedom to grow, change and improve educationally seems to be largely constricted by the impositions of UAN.

A local teacher of English at a National Plus school highlighted the constricting nature of the existing system when he described his experiences and observations of life under the weight of UAN. He spoke of it as "both annoying and disappointing because in our education we should be aiming to achieve higher standards than those that are officially identified".

This teacher could directly observe and show where these shortfalls in, and failures of, standards were occurring. In a recent paper which teachers were obliged to administer to their students he counted "at least twelve serious mistakes that we have been trying to teach the students not to make."

As an example he cited the fact that the paper often included lines such as this 'The people sees that something was wrong but didn't do anything.' Clearly the verb 'to see' has been used in the wrong form. This is a quite common mistake for students but they really should not be having that kind of mistake reinforced and thus worsened by the final test they must take for their senior high school education.

Obviously this is a grave concern to teachers but this concern is accentuated by the observation that they are not alone in seeing these kinds of mistakes. For example the same teacher mentioned above noted that he was "certain that the students recognize these mistakes as they do the tests and it just makes them even less motivated to do the tests and also try to do well."

This is a sad condition, when the testers are being legitimately doubted by those that they test. Academically and educationally it is, then, apparent that UAN has been failing to make the grade in certain areas. But there is also another manner in which UAN must cause all parties to feel concern and dissatisfaction and that, unfortunately, is a familiar one for Indonesians and that is the notion of corruption. And perhaps most sad of all is that this notion of corruption can be found in the minds and thinking of Indonesian school students.

Recently a group of students that will be completing their high school education this academic year spoke frankly about their perceptions of UAN. "It's just no good," said one. Was this just typical dislike of examinations? Perhaps not, because another student took up the theme with, "Nobody accepts UAN as being good.

If I want to go to a university in Singapore, they will just ignore my UAN scores and insist that I do many other tests instead." Clearly no positive sentiments here and this is most sad because this same student is following a program that evidently she has little or no faith in.

But laying aside these negative academic sentiments a moment, what the next student said was disturbing for ethical reasons. She said, with hardly a flicker of embarrassment, that if you were to do badly in the UAN there was always a way to improve your scores. Probed to clarify exactly what she meant she openly said, "Well, you know, you can just give someone some money and your scores will get better."

What a predicament we would seem to be in, then. Not only do these students have little faith in the program of study that they must pursue but they are also already familiar with and accepting of the notion that should their scores in anyway prove disappointing there is a corrupt and deceitful manner in which they could change the situation.

This is not to say that any of those students were expressing any direct intention to corruptly influence their scores but it does illustrate how they evidently felt and recognized the weakness of the system in the sense that it could and can be readily circumvented and thus undermined.

It is widely accepted that education in Indonesia is a developing sector, this is entirely appropriate, as all education systems should grow with the changing times. Evidently there have been many problems and challenges to UAN and, gradually, it seems likely that it will be removed.

There is talk that it will be replaced with a new centralized system of testing. Others have suggested that schools should have greater autonomy to produce and manage their own systems of testing. Whether the future will bring a new central testing device, or greater consent is given for independent school testing, is in some respects a secondary argument.

What is absolutely essential is that there is consensus that any new system is both educationally and academically and ethically strong. There should be no, or at least far more limited, scope for critics to complain that the system is not targeting appropriately high standards.