Students' rank basis fails to meet the grade

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.