W

ith only four days left before the national exam for high school and vocational school students nationwide, the Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Ministry is confident that all preparations will be finished by Monday.

Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Minister Anies Baswedan announced on Thursday that the distribution of the paper-based national exam had gone ahead as scheduled.

'€œEverything has been distributed on time and so we are ready. The exam papers have all reached the most remote areas and for more accessible areas, such as Jakarta and West Java, they will be sent on Saturday,'€ he said.

Previous years have been plagued with late distribution, resulting in some schools holding the exam a week later than scheduled.

This year, more than 2.8 million final year students from 11,914 high schools and vocational schools will take the national exams, which will be conducted for three days from Monday.

This year also marks the first time some schools will try out a computer-based national exam system that the ministry touted would be more efficient and less prone to cheating. Anies said that 585 schools nationwide had been given the green light as they were well equipped.

'€œFive hundred and eighty-five schools equal 2.4 percent of all schools nationwide. Yogyakarta has the highest percent with 9.7 percent of the schools in the region,'€ he said, adding that he had asked state electricity company PLN not to shut off the power at schools conducting the computer-based exam during the examination period.

'€œIf the power suddenly goes off we have designed software that ensures all the answers will be saved so that the students won'€™t have to repeat the exam. However, we made sure schools doing the computer-based test also have generators just in case.'€

Although most of the exam papers have been distributed, Anies acknowledged that a video conference on Thursday with education agencies in West Sulawesi and Gorontalo revealed that they had not received enough papers.

'€œWe will verify this as soon as possible to make sure that the papers are ready on Monday,'€ he said.

Meanwhile, the head of the ministry'€™s Educational Evaluation Center (Puspendik), Nizam, said only one printing company was responsible for Gorontalo and all of Sulawesi, except North Sulawesi, and this year was the company'€™s first time to print the national exam papers.

'€œIt is possible that the education agencies only counted the number of envelopes containing the exam papers, instead of the papers themselves, since they cannot open the envelopes yet. It'€™s possible that the company tried to save on envelopes by putting more in each one,'€ he said.

However, Nizam said the ministry had prepared for the worst by putting more exam papers in each envelope than each school had ordered. This way, he explained, proctors could easily ask for spare exam papers from neighboring classes.

'€œWe'€™ve already prepared for such a case. If a whole school finds there aren'€™t enough then they should not report to the printing company but immediately ask a neighboring school for spares,'€ Nizam said.

This year also marks the first time the national exam will no longer determine whether a student graduates or not. Instead, graduation is determined by school administrators and the final school exam grades.

Although final year students are required to take the national exam at least once, they can choose to retake the exam if they fail or feel that they need to improve their grades as its scores will still be used by universities to determine admission.

Anies had repeatedly claimed that the change was made in order to encourage studying without stress and to prevent teachers and students from cheating to gain high test scores.