Strict supervision of the national final exams to root out cheating is unnecessary, as it will cause anxiety among students, an official at the National Education Ministry says.
Djemari Mardapi, senior official at the ministry's National Education Standards Agency, made the statement on Monday in response to news that some schools would use CCTV to supervise the exams.
“Supervision involving CCTV or police officers is too much. It just inconveniences the students,” he said.
However, he urged strict supervision of the printing and distribution of exam papers, adding that the papers constituted secret state documents.
“But when it comes to the exams, just apply normal supervision for the students,” he said.
Djemari also suggested that top officials, such as the education minister and the Jakarta governor, wishing to conduct random inspections of examinations should do so quickly so as not to disturb students.
Djemari said his agency had received complaints about misconduct and leaked documents during the first day of the final exam on Monday, but added that he was not overly concerned about the incidents.
“There have always been reports about leaked exam papers every year, but those are merely rumors,” he said, adding that students were expected to ignore such rumors.
He said the exam papers were highly confidential and that the ministry had allocated Rp 67 billion (US$7.7 million) to ensure their content remained secret.
Final year high-school students nationwide took part in the first day of the national final exams on Monday, with 122,000 participants in Jakarta alone.
On the first day, natural science students sat Indonesian and biology exams, and social science students took Indonesian and sociology exams.
The ministry has produced five versions of each exam paper of each subject to discourage cheating. (lfr)
