Thesis writing aids students

Thesis writing aids students

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): One question being widely discussed these days
is whether or not university students should be required to write
a thesis paper at the end of their studies.

Within the traditions of Indonesian university education,
students must write a thesis, or skripsi (from Dutch word:
scriptie) at the end of their college education, which should
serve as evidence of their academic accomplishments.

Historically, thesis papers thus had a very significant
academic meaning, both for the student and for the university. It
is a sad fact, however, that the quality of theses produced by
Indonesian students, and supervised by Indonesian professors, has
been declining very sharply since the 1970s.

The debate about theses was triggered by an announcement made
by the rector of Universitas Indonesia on April 4, 1996, which
stated that students at the university are no longer required to
write a thesis to obtain their S-1 (sarjana) degrees.

On April 6, the rector of IKIP Jakarta -- the Teachers'
Training Institute in Jakarta -- made the same announcement. The
rationale behind these two identical decisions was that the
requirement of writing a thesis has caused bottlenecks at the
university, because most students are not able to finish the
writing of their thesis in time.

Immediately, these two announcements raised comments from
within the academic community. Basically, there are three types
of opinion.

First, there are comments which refute this decision. It is
argued that abolishing the requirement to write a thesis will,
without doubt, lower the academic standard of our university
education. Without the requirement to write a thesis, students
will not be compelled to perform academic exercises in problem
conceptualization and problem solution. This will deprive
graduates from possessing the core abilities of university-
educated people.

The second group of comments argued that writing a thesis
should be made voluntary, and not mandatory or be abolished.
Students should have the freedom to make a choice between either
pursuing an S-1 program which involves writing a thesis or
pursuing an alternate S-1 program which doesn't.

The reasoning behind the latter argument is that students have
different practical needs and different interests concerning
academic life. Besides there being students who -- for practical
and personal reasons -- want to finish their studies as soon as
possible, there are also students who genuinely want to receive a
real, "solid" academic education.

This latter type of students need thorough training in how to
adequately research a topic -- or how to conduct the research --
and how to best report their results. We should not deny these
type of students the opportunity to learn these valuable skills.

The third group of comments support the idea of abolishing
this thesis-writing requirement.

In addition to the reason put forward already by the rectors
of Universitas Indonesia and IKIP Jakarta, two additional reasons
were mentioned.

One is that most university students in Indonesia are not
going to become researchers anyway. The second reason is that
the obstacles which have been encountered by students in their
efforts to write good theses are almost insurmountable.

One explanation for this is the poor command of language among
students. Another explanation is that the process of finding
members of the teaching staff who really have the time and the
competence to guide students through the arduous process of
writing a thesis is a very demanding task.

So why retain a tradition which can no longer be implemented
in a meaningful way? Why require students to go through an
exercise which does not provide them a meaningful learning
experience?

Reading various articles on this issue, I have the impression
that we have not yet entirely digested the fact that our system
of higher education has undergone a tremendous transformation
since the early 1950s. The conditions of the 1950s were
beautifully described by Prof. Andi Hakim Nasution in his two
articles in the Kompas daily of April 9 and 10, 1996.

What we have today is a very far cry from what we had in the
1950s. In the 1950s, SMA high school graduates who enrolled at
Indonesian universities were assumed to be able to overcome their
personal deficiencies.

If their basic competence in Dutch, English or mathematics was
not entirely adequate, it was their personal responsibility to
strengthen it, to bring it up to a satisfactory level.

I do not think that this assumption can still be retained
today. Thus, if our primary aim in educating our university
students is to increase their academic abilities, we must find
measures to help them overcome any shortcomings they may have. We
must design, for instance, remedial courses that will bring their
knowledge and skills in the fundamentals to an acceptable level.

On the institution side, our universities have also been
transformed. They are no longer the lofty and awesome
institutions they were in the 1950s. They are much more mundane
today, and some of them even insipid.

Our teaching staff has also been transformed. Not many among
the members of our teaching staffs have the ability to read
references in English, German or French. Not many among them can
live adequately on their monthly salaries, and are able to buy
books. And not many among them can write in an academically
acceptable formats and styles.

However, no matter how much our universities have been
transformed in a negative way, I do not think it wise to abandon
the ideal of good universities, inspired by conditions in the
1950s. I do not think we should give up the idea of academic
perfection.

To me, the transformation that has taken place means primarily
that our criterion of a good university education must be
redefined, to make it possible for our students, our teaching
staff and our institutions to attain it.

This requires a hard look at the realities that exist within
and around our universities today.

How are we going to elevate our students from their low
academic competence to a reasonably acceptable level? How are we
going to make them able to write essays in Indonesian without
making syntactical mistakes? How are we going to make them able
to participate intelligently in professional discussions
conducted in English? And, finally, how are we going to make
them able to write business documents or professional papers in
comprehensible and tolerable English? These are some of the hard
questions that we have to answer.

Viewed from this standpoint, I do not think that writing or
not writing a thesis constitutes the essential question.

I think that for the time being, our primary objective is to
help our students develop gradually the ability to think
systematically, and to express their thoughts in a clear,
economic and elegant way.

They should be asked to do this by writing short papers first,
moving later on to longer works: both master and doctoral theses.
I think that regular exercises in writing good short papers for
four consecutive years is a better educational experience than
writing just one big paper at the end of a four-year academic
training.

The key element here is that every writing exercise must be a
real learning experience for our students. This will happen only
if the teaching staff assigned to be a student's advisors really
reads every draft that the student submits, which is then
followed by an instructive dialog. Students will not learn much
if their drafts and papers are not reviewed by their advisors in
a fair and constructive way.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.