Cheating is failure of the education system

A massive cheating scandal has rocked our schools. One vivid example was the case uncovered at Gadel 2 State Elementary School in Surabaya, East Java.

A mother, Siami, reported to the local education office that her son, Alifah Ahmad Maulana, a sixth-grader at the school, had been forced to share his national examination answers with his classmates.

As a result of her report, angered parents allegedly intimidated Siami and her family, and the family was hounded out of their home.

The cheating scandal, together with various concealed cheating cases in this country, suggests honesty is waning. The spirit of honesty has been abandoned and deemed the common enemy by the public. Immoral behaviors involving kleptomania, greed, manipulation and deceit are thriving in the public domain.

The massive cheating constitutes an irony of our education system. Teachers, who are supposed to safeguard and instill a sense of honesty in students, instead instructed them to cheat. Apart from the widespread moral degradation, cheating raises a deep question about teachers’ and students’ doubts about facing the national examinations. Deceit in examinations is a means of saving time or effort required for students to pass.

Rampant cheating in our school system may be a result of a shortage of motivational programs for students in the face of the difficult national exams. For years, teachers and students have focused solely on exercises before exams. Meanwhile, efforts to improve the learning atmosphere and character building measures have been unseen.

Honesty and accountability therefore must be developed to bring about the necessary huge improvements in terms of the national exams. However, the issue is currently stuck in the “all talk and not much action” cycle. For the nation’s sake, students need to be reminded of momentous honest and accountable characters, in place of negative ones.

As a matter of fact, cheating in a test is also found in higher education, especially in entrance exams. Media headlines have been jammed with stories about students who cheat on entrance exams for prestigious universities. But such cheating hardly makes news in college newspapers, much less warrants a full-scale police investigation. Anyone bucking the system risks becoming a pariah, though for many, perhaps, this student may seem more like an anti-hero.

Whatever one’s personal stance, this story reveals the need for change in the university entrance exam system. At the university level, entrance exams are huge moneymakers, making students perform rather than learn think deeply or critically. The current exam system reinforces an excessive focus on outcome, which is one lesson the students seemed to have understood, perhaps too well.

Universities, whether public or private, are not run on the basis of transparency. The process of creating exams is tightly guarded. The results of some exams are released later on request, but individual test-takers are never allowed to view their own results. Social status and political power often rely on secrecy. Universities are no exception.

Though the solution is not a piece of cake, universities must reassess their process of selection for admissions. Increasing the number of proctors, refusing toilet breaks and searching students for cell phones, for instance, is not going to solve this problem. The pressures are too great and the belief that getting into a good school will lead to certain success is too deeply founded.

Several universities have been and are showing consideration for high school grades, recommendations, outside activities, interviews and essays as alternatives to the paper-based, multiple-choice exams. One cannot text for help during an in-person interview.

A major key to overcoming widespread cheating in our educational system lies in changing the mindset of teachers and students. It would be better-off admitting to an objective reality than applying false makeup.

If students do not pass the exams, tell and show them why and what went wrong. They may learn from their mistakes. Students who pass their exams by cheating will think this is an acceptable way to get ahead. They will therefore repeat this in their adult lives, in the process damaging the nation’s competitiveness.

The incident in Surabaya has shed new light on just how rotten the system is. It should prompt authorities to replace rote learning with a curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking. The national exams at elementary and secondary schools and the entrance exams at higher education facilities have really come under criticism because they place too much emphasis on exams to determine students’ level of achievement and aptitude. Such pressure forces many to cheat.

The time has come to change our approach to educating our youth. Finding better ways to select students would help the entire educational system to focus on what should be the real task at hand — learning thoroughly, critically and, dare it be mentioned, pleasurably. We must not let this country be systematically ruined by means of education.

The writer, a graduate of the University of Canberra, is a lecturer at Andalas University, Padang.