Citation

Mukminin A, Fridiyanto F, Hidayat M, Habibi A, Haryanto E, Harto K, Makmur M, Muazza M, Masbirorotni M. Library Philosophy and Practice 2019; 2019: 1-13.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The National Final Exam ignores students' socioeconomic backgrounds, quality teachers and principals, facilities, and resources among schools across the regions. Testing only cognitive skills (mental skill) but ignoring the other domains of educational activities, namely, affective and psychomotor domains. Students failed in the National Final Exam became stressed and embarrassed and some committed suicide. Cheating and exam paper leaks are the main problem in the exam. Besides, the exam has forced teachers to teach to the test and has made teachers stressed. The solution is the reform of the National Final Exam policy so that it is not used as the single test to measure students' performance. The head of the executives in the country should take the reform the National Final Exam as mandated by the Law on National Education System No. 20/2003 and the Law No.32/2004 about "Local Government" (provinces and districts) as the existing and inadequate programs from Department of National Education, local governments, and school districts do not work as they are supposed to and do not match each other. Also, lacking coordination and maintaining a centralized system in which local governments and school districts only wait for the instructions from the top policymakers. Hence, producing a presidential Instruction to reform the National Final Exam policy is a must. This instruction covers (1) the National Final Exam should be used to monitor the quality of education and should not be given every year after each of provinces has its own standardized test. (2) Local governments, school, and teachers have choices to choose standardized tests provided by other parties such as universities and test centers and involve in assessing and evaluating their student learning especially for affective and psychomotor domains by using portfolios. Likely the opposition is from the Department of National Education using the exam to measure the quality of education in terms of student achievement without considering the impacts of the exam. Potentially supports will come from parents, students, teachers, principals, educators, test developers, test centers, universities, NGOs, and researchers, members of House of Representative, and teacher union. © 2019 University of Idaho Library.

Language: en

Keywords

Jurisdiction; National final exam policy; Policy alternatives; Policy feasibility