Why Indonesia Changed Its High School Exam Scale to 200-800

Why Indonesia Changed Its High School Exam Scale to 200-800

Reporter

September 20, 2026 | 09:54 pm

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has changed the assessment system for academic ability tests (TKA) at the high school level for the 2026 academic year. Under Ministerial Decree No. 56/2026, TKA scores will no longer use a 0–100 scale, shifting instead to a range of 200 to 800.

Toni Toharudin, head of the ministry’s Primary and Secondary Education Policy Agency, clarified that the shift applies solely to how scores are reported. “It’s not a change in the measured abilities or the difficulty level of the test,” he said during a phone interview on Sunday, September 20, 2026.

Toni explained that TKA test results are evaluated using a psychometric approach grounded in item response theory (IRT). Therefore, student scores are not determined merely by the percentage of correct answers. “But they consider the characteristics and difficulty level of each question,” he said.

Participants’ estimated abilities are subsequently converted onto the 200–800 scale. The new reporting framework aims to deliver a more precise measure of student performance for academic selection and skill mapping.

According to him, the adjusted scale offers a more proportional way to differentiate student performance levels. He further stated that the updated range helps dispel the misconception that a TKA score directly corresponds to a raw percentage of correct answers. For instance, a score of 600 on the TKA does not mean a student correctly answered 60 percent of the test items.

“So this change is not intended to raise or lower the participants’ scores, but to improve the accuracy, fairness, and quality of TKA results interpretation,” Toni concluded.

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