Students' rank basis fails to meet the grade

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Ranking students is an established practice in the Indonesian educational system. At the end of every quarter, and every school year, students are ranked on the basis of their scores in achievement tests.

Students who succeed in placing themselves at the higher ranks of the scale are praised and hailed. Those at the bottom are reprimanded and ridiculed, while those in the middle, the majority, are largely ignored. They are just faceless entities. They are the average -- students with no special achievements that will make them remembered by both their teachers and their peers.

This tradition has been going on year after year, generation after generation, without anyone ever seriously challenging it.

Lately, however, critical opinion has emerged in this regard, both among parents and among teachers.

Parents argue that this ranking practice does not tell them much about the best next step to be taken to advance their children's education.

Teachers argue that this practice is the result of a tradition of looking at the students merely as a group, without a serious attempt to grasp the individuality of each student.

Two classical arguments have been put forward by teachers in this regard to justify their criticisms.

The first argument runs like follows: "If two students are equally excellent academically, so that neither one of them can be ranked as the number one, and both must be ranked as number one-and-a-half, does it really mean that they are academically identical?"

The second argument asks whether those who score low in their achievement tests really have learned nothing during a given quarter or school year. Are they really zero-achievement students?

The answer to both questions is a big "No!"

Experiences show that no two smart students are ever intellectually or academically identical. There are always differences between such students, but the instruments used to assess their achievements are too blunt to detect these differences.

With regard to the question about the nonachievers, the answer is that every normal student has always learned something during a given period of time.

It is pure delusion to think that nonachievers are students without the ability to learn anything. Such students may not have learned much in terms of academic ability, but they surely have learned something that the school tests fail to detect and describe.

Sociability, for instance, is a valuable characteristic in real life. But do our schools formally value such personal characteristic? And do they know how to detect and monitor it?

Another example is special talents like leadership, musical aptitude and an inclination to be systematic in anything a student does. Do our schools take such talents into account when they evaluate students' achievements?

Based on this kind of criticisms, two suggestions have been made to increase the usefulness and accuracy of students' evaluation.

* Improvement concerning the types of data to be compiled regarding each student.

* Improvement in the format of reporting the results of students' evaluation.

The first suggestion recommends that the data concerning the nonacademic qualities of students, as perceived both by the school and by other social institutions, including the family, be included in the evaluation program.

The second suggestion recommends that the practice of ranking students be replaced with a system of profiling their respective achievements. Through this reporting format, the individuality of each student will become much more visible. And consequently it will become much easier to decide in a systematic way which next development path each student should preferably pursue, and which paths each one of them should avoid.

Beautiful and rational as these ideas may be, it seems impossible to put them into practice within the present condition of our educational system.

The idea that the task of evaluating students' achievements must be aimed at obtaining a continuous and well-rounded picture of each student's personality, and how each one of them develops from one stage to the next, is still alien in our educational system.

In our present system, evaluation of students' achievements is still directed toward assessing their ability to carry out school assignments. Whether these assignments are geared to the students' respective personality makeup has never been a matter of concern for the designers of our standard achievement tests.

It is, indeed, not their business. To them, the main purpose of educational evaluation through standardized tests is to assess students' ability to digest a given amount of knowledge during a given period. On the basis of this view, evaluation of educational achievement always proceeds in a uniform manner.

No attempt has been made to augment this uniform and standard method with auxiliary steps to reveal the individuality of each student.

The idea of changing the practice of ranking students into the practice of profiling their individual progress can only be implemented in a meaningful manner after fundamental changes are introduced into our schools concerning methods and procedures of evaluating students' achievements.

Such a change will never materialize as long as we are unwilling to answer the very basic questions: What is the purpose of evaluating students' development? Do we carry out educational evaluation for the purpose of guiding their individual development, or do we design our evaluation program for the purpose of showing to the public that education is the sole domain of the bureaucracy, as many teachers in the field suspect?

I fully realize that this is a very nasty and crude question. But unless we face this ethical and technical question squarely, we will never make real progress in our educational system. We will just keep fooling ourselves.

Against this background, it is really very encouraging that within our present systems, there are schools in which both parents and teachers are asking this critical question.

Even though there is still no clear idea yet among both parents and teachers how this problem should be solved, the act of asking this question itself is a favorable sign.

Indeed, we still have to scrutinize its finer details before we will be able to fully understand this problem and subsequently develop the capability to overcome it.

This phenomenon constitutes a significant sign concerning the ability of our society to sustain an educational system capable of rejuvenating and modernizing itself.

Can such a change take place without the consent of the bureaucracy? At this stage of our reform movement, the answer is no.

But in the next, and more mature stage of our political development -- which will come sooner than later -- the question will become the following: Can any government afford to ignore this creative and restorative impulse within our society?

As I see it, the time will come when our schools will cease being the rear end of the bureaucracy. At the next stage, concerned parents and teachers will make the school the vanguard of an enlightened civil society.