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.