M

ore than 2 million senior high school students took part in national exams on April 16–19.

Like previous years, this year, rather than resorting to useful academic activities, students braced themselves for the exam by attending mass prayers both in an open compound and in graveyards, apparently hoping to obtain spiritual blessings from supernatural powers and to receive divine counsel, which is felt by many as being psychologically soothing.

This eerie behavior mirrors the students’ excessive angst and acquiescence over their fates.

As the national exam belongs to a high-stake test, which could affect (either positively or negatively) the student’s future, such behavior is understandable.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of fraudulent and deceitful acts, security measures have been tightened nationwide, with the government deploying more officers to the country’s regions to safeguard exam documents.

No less eerie are the vigilant proctors who keep a watchful eye on students during the exam, and who are ready to put them in a pillory should they be caught red-handed cheating.

It has become public knowledge that the annual academic ritual always ignites endless spats among government officials, academics and educational practitioners alike, generating more dissension than consensus.

In the eyes of laymen, the exam is nothing more than an unjust academic practice orchestrated by the Education and Culture Ministry.

Furthermore, the root hitch, as scholars have repeatedly articulated, is that the exam is likely to yield unreliable results which, after all, do not really measure students’ standard competencies as prescribed in the national curriculum.

The public’s distrust of the exam is certainly well-founded, especially given that the government-sanctioned exam is studded with foul play and poses more problems than solutions in relation to the troubled national education system.

As such, terminating the exam is seen as the most rational choice to put an end the student’s psychological burden and the public outcry.

Despite a barrage of castigations leveled at the national exam, the insights generated from pedagogical vantage points are often unheard.

This is because our thinking is always preoccupied with banal news that reports recurring problems such as the procurements of test logistics, cheating, and a leakage of question and answer sheets.

Also, our understanding of the essence of an exam is often obscured by legal and political discourse at the expense of the pedagogical discourse.

For instance, in a recent television interview we are informed, if not warned, that the national exam is not going to be abolished from the educational realm, as it is a constitutional mandate that needs to be obligatorily executed by education practitioners. Opposing it is tantamount to defying the Constitution.

Basing the justification on a legal aspect, the Education and Culture Ministry finds it is at ease in exercising its role as gatekeeper in determining students’ academic success and failure via the policy it has created. It is the authority granted by the legal basis that creates power imbalances between test makers and test takers.

Thus, the anxiety and hysteria that the students go through every year in anticipating the national exam depicts their powerlessness as test takers.

Pedagogically, the purpose of giving exams to students is not primarily to assign grades or certificates and label them with a “pass or fail” distinction.

School teacher-made exams, not to mention the standardized national exam, must serve as a learning instrument that can aid students by reinforcing and motivating them to learn further and to conduct self-assessments. In addition, the use of these exams should ensure us that they can facilitate the students’ transfer of learning.

These all imply that the outcome of an exam must demonstrate a beneficial “backwash effect” — the effects of an exam on learning and teaching.

If, for example, students feel exhilarated in demonstrating their prowess in composing an expository prose in an exam, then such an exam is more likely to have a positive backwash. It also allows the transfer of learning to be facilitated and accelerated.

If, on the other hand, students are required to memorize the rules of writing a good exposition by choosing the correct answer from available alternative, the backwash is surely harmful.

It should be clear given the practicality and efficiency considerations in test administration that the national exam does not provide any room for the students to fully display their real-life competencies — competencies that might be relevant and useful in their future careers.

The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University. He is also chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.