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ducation and Culture Minister Muhammad Nuh said on Monday that 99.52 percent of high school students in the country had passed the national exams for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Nuh said a school's own evaluation of its student was an inaccurate barometer of academic competency, as many practiced grade inflation.

'With the national exams, we can see the real condition of our children. If we just see grades given by schools, it will be hard to see who is the best because most of the schools give good grades to their students,' he said in a press conference on Monday.

Based on data from the ministry, of 1,632,757 high school students nationwide who took the exam, only 0.48 percent failed.

That number was a slight increase on the 0.47 percent in the previous academic year.

Meanwhile, 99.9 percent of 1,171,907 vocational high school students passed, on par with last year's 99.94 percent.

Nuh also said that he applauded a recent policy rolled out by the country's universities to take into consideration national exams scores, which according to him were a good admissions metric.

Federation for Indonesian Teachers Associations (FSGI) secretary-general Retno Listyarti said that near-perfect passing rate did not indicate improvement in student performance.

'It's just an easily cooked-up number. It's a false success for me and the majority of teachers,' she said.

Retno said that there were examples of how random the national exams actually were.

She said that many high school students reported encountering exam questions on topics they had never learned about from their teachers, which according to her was a cruel reality.

'The national exams should not be used as a factor to decide if a student graduates or not. That triggers cheating,' she said, adding that students had begun using much more sophisticated and organized cheating methods.

She went on to say that it was unfair for students in the country's far-flung, less developed regions, such as Papua or Maluku, to take the same exams as students in Jakarta or other major cities.

According to her, students needed better facilities to improve their academic performance, not exams.

'You can imagine, there might be some students in remote areas failing to pass the exams because of their English score. But if you look deeper into the problem, their schools most likely did not have language laboratories like schools in Jakarta,' she said.

The ministry data shows that North Kalimantan was the province with the highest failure rate, 2.51 percent. In Jakarta, meanwhile, only 0.19 percent of high school students failed to pass.

Retno added that she agreed national exams were useful to gauge student performance, but that they should not determine whether a student could pursue higher education.

Nuh has been under fire for sticking to the national exams as the only requirement for a student to graduate. Nuh has stood his ground and said that the national exams would continue in junior and senior high schools.

Last year, however, he decided starting from the 2014-2015 academic year, the national exams for elementary schools would be dropped. (idb)