Students, teachers and parents across the country were under pressure in the past few days as the results of the national exam were finally revealed.

As a parent of a high school senior, for nearly two months after the exam dates I felt like a first-time parent waiting at the exit of a haunted house in an amusement park. I had no idea what would happen to my child inside the house and was not sure if she could survive, even when I knew that she has been doing well in school and in many other challenging tests before.

The national exam policy continues to lack transparency. In a country where even prosecutors, judges and parliamentarians can be bribed, the national exam sounds like a nationwide early introduction to corrupt the mindset of our children. Before the exam dates, rumors circulated of offers of leaked test papers.

During the exam, some local test supervisors, out of fear that students in their district would perform poorly (maybe resulting in poor performance for their districts), were giving the students 10 minutes to "compare" their answers before the exam finished. There was also a case where top students were offered money by their teachers to write down their answers, perhaps with the hope that the teachers could then use their answers to "massage" the answers of the academically ordinary students in the school.

Now that the exam results are "individually notified" to the parents, there are still no final scores. It will take another two weeks for the district national education offices to tally the results. It sounds like another two-week period for bargaining.

There is no question that our national education system needs a measurement tool to assess educational performance in an increasingly competitive global society. Developed countries have for many years implemented standardized scholastic tests that have become de-facto measurement systems of students' performance, including requirements to enter college. There is however some common ground in the ways in which these reputable tests, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or American College Test (ACT) and others, are conducted.

First, they are independently administered by professional testing agencies, and not by government bureaucracies (especially not by corrupt ones). Second, they have absolute transparency by making the information on the scope of the test, the scoring system, the correct answers (after the test dates) and the final scores accessible to all the participants.

And most importantly, there is no opportunity for personal contact between the test participants and the testing agencies as everything is done impersonally via the Internet. Compare that to our typical national education offices, which are often not even managed by a competent education professional.

It is perhaps important for the government to, once and for all, look at effort versus return on this national exam policy. It is true that the nationally executed exam can provide the government with baseline data on the overall picture of students' performance across the country. The government can even make a comparison on the level of performance between different regions that would be useful in targeting educational quality improvement programs.

But, there is absolutely no need to make the national exam a requirement for a student to graduate and be accepted in state funded schools, as is currently the case. Let us examine the unnecessary costs of this poorly conceived mandatory exam policy.

First, schools that the government itself have required to be more innovative in tailoring their curriculum to meet specific local needs find themselves in an odd position. The government all of a sudden is insisting on using a uniform tool to measure these supposedly diverse and rich centers of innovation.

The unnecessary cost of making the national exam mandatory has been the willingness of schools to do anything to ensure high pass rates including by switching their curriculum back to a one-size-fits-all mode. Worst, schools may decide to just bribe the corrupt officials at the national education offices to maintain their "reputation" potentially ignoring their sound innovations.

Second, many students who have been accustomed to an active learning system find it difficult to switch from the independent research skills that they have been taught to the "beating-multiple-choice-test" skills that require more experience of as many tests as possible. The psychological costs of this to our younger generation have been very high varying from an apathetic attitude to developing an "all-is-fair to win" mindset. This is contrary to building the spirit to win through an open and transparent competition that future Indonesians will need to have to survive global competition.

In a recent interview, Bambang Sudibyo, the education minister, stated that as a professor of management he would like to apply modern management to the national education system. What perhaps he does not realize is that modern management requires a thoroughly designed and calculated policy, a policy which would ensure desired results and not create unnecessary costs.

Parents spend millions of rupiah to pay for exam preparatory courses. The money could have been better spent on giving their children extra life skills, as opposed to teaching them the skills to beat-or-cheat multi-choice tests. Better yet, the money could have been used to help low-income families pay for their children's education for life. The minister's mastery in management appears to be insufficient for properly thinking through his own policy.

There remains one option for the parents whose unfortunate children still cannot "pass" the mandatory national exam insisted upon by the minister -- a class-action suit. In a country where the government is not yet offering free education for all, it would be against the Constitution to deny the right of our young citizens to advance their education just because they cannot pass a three-hour national exam.

The mandatory nature of the exam clearly ignores the students' right to recognition of their many other achievements during their school years. The minister had better get a very good constitutional lawyer if he wants to keep his job.

The writer, the parent of a high school senior, teaches regional development studies at the University of Indonesia and Bogor Institute of Agriculture. He can be reached at iwan-g@indo.net.id

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