Score conversion: Smoke and mirrors

Patrick Guntensperger, Jakarta

Indonesia suffers internationally from bad press. We all know that foreign companies refuse en masse to invest here because of her status as one of the world's most corrupt countries. Indonesia is known as a haven for video and music piracy. The Bali and Marriott bombings have done little to encourage tourism. Indonesia has a reputation for selective enforcement of environmental laws, resulting in massive pollution.

Indonesia's national educational system is seen as substandard anywhere outside of the Third World. Clearly, Indonesia would do well to make every effort to try to develop a more positive image for the rest of the world. Perhaps that is the thinking that attempts to justify the harebrained decision to "convert" students' scores on national examinations.

By manipulating the statistics to reflect a fiction, some people seem to believe that the perception of our educational system will be improved. Perhaps a more clear-thinking government will see that this misguided kind of deception will have precisely the opposite effect. There are so many things wrong with the idea of score conversions, that it's hard to know where to begin.

In the first place, no one will be fooled. The implementation of score conversions, far from convincing people that, on average, our students are doing better than they really are, will merely cause all their scores to be dismissed as false.

Our scoring system is already considered questionable as a result of inconsistencies in testing methods, the perceived availability of higher scores to those who can afford a bribe and rampant cheating. If we add to that the fact that the government will adjust the results in order to obtain a prettier bell-curve, the whole exercise of imposing national exams becomes a pointless waste of time and money.

What do our students learn from the policy of score conversion? Well first of all, they learn that intellectual effort in order to get good grades is futile. Better results may be reduced and poor results enhanced to conform to a fiction; scores don't reflect one's mastery of the subject but rather someone's idealized vision of our educational system.

They also learn that truth is not a particularly valuable commodity. When their educators create statistical fictions to support a false image of their success or failure at their jobs, how can we ever expect to instill concepts such as integrity and honesty in our children?

False statistical reports of our students' mastery of the curriculum make it next to impossible to improve the curriculum, the syllabus or our teaching methods. If we don't know how we're really doing, how can we possibly make any improvements? And if we make changes, how can we know if they are working? To choose to manipulate the results is to accept failure, to decide to perpetuate it and to try to sell everyone a lie about it.

If observers of our troubled educational system are unimpressed by the current standards, their impressions will soon deteriorate even further. It will be clear to any thinking person that there hasn't been a sudden improvement in our student's performances just because the statistics suddenly become more flattering to the Department of Education.

What's more, they'll know that the likelihood of any improvement in the future has just been significantly diminished, because our ability to monitor our actual, real performance has just been hamstrung. In yet another transparent attempt at deception, a government scheme will have accomplished little more than shooting themselves in the foot.

The effort to convince observers and interested parties that our educational system is better than it actually is will have had the effect of convincing everyone that it is, if possible, worse than it is.

So Indonesia's reputation suffers, the accuracy of our understanding of our educational system suffers, the poor education of our graduates causes business and industry to suffer and, most important, our children suffer. Their poor education will deny them acceptance at reputable institutions of higher learning, they will be unprepared to compete with graduates of educational systems with integrity and good standards and they will have been taught that mediocrity is acceptable as long as you lie about it.

Here's a radical idea! Let's improve the education of our children rather than just adjust their marks to pretend they're learning something they're not. Let's address the reality rather than just the image. Perhaps a new government might divert some funds from the streams of graft flowing into the private accounts of corrupt officials and invest them in our educational system.

Recruit professional teachers and pay them a good wage. Impose high standards, research and deploy the most effective teaching methods, upgrade teaching facilities, improve curricula, build libraries in schools, update reading lists and the books themselves. Nothing would be more effective at convincing people that we have an effective education system than actually having an effective education system. Perhaps to those who would prefer simply to practice spin control, these seem like outlandish ideas.

The writer, social and political commentator, can be reached at ttpguntensperger@hotmail.com