T

he Culture and Primary and Secondary Education Ministry has said it will use the results of its monitoring of high school and vocational school exams to measure the integrity of individual schools.

The ministry is expected to publish the index in May.

Culture and Primary and Secondary Education Minister Anies Baswedan said Tuesday that since the national exam would no longer determine whether a student graduated, the ministry would instead focus on gauging the integrity of schools and compare the results with last year'€™s integrity index at the regency level.

'€œFor the past five years the ministry has kept track of the honesty index in regencies and we have found that at least 10 percent of students at schools cheat in groups,'€ Anies said in a press briefing at the ministry building in South Jakarta.

Ministry data from 2010 to 2014 show that 52 out of 514 regencies and cities scored 90 percent on the integrity index, which means that more than 90 percent of schools in those regencies and municipalities have high scores for honesty.

'€œThe range is from 0 percent to 100 percent, the higher the percentage, the more honest the areas. According to our data, Yogyakarta and Jakarta were among the highest, with Jakarta scoring highest,'€ he said.

Other areas such as Pegunungan Arfak regency in West Papua, Lingga regency in the Riau Islands and Banggai Laut regency in Central Sulawesi also scored high in data collected between 2010 and 2014.

Although Anies declined to give details on the method to calculate the integrity of schools, he said it was a common method used in academia but rarely used here.

'€œThis year'€™s index will be more detailed and we will have a list of schools and their scores. The index will reveal which schools have a high percentage of cheating. We will reveal the details after the exams,'€ he said.

This year, more than 2.8 million final year students from 28,914 high schools and vocational schools are taking the national exams, which kicked off on Monday.

This year marks the first time the national exam will no longer determine whether a student graduates. Instead, graduation will be determined by school administrators and grades from final exams organized by schools.

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 need to improve their grades as its scores will be used by universities to determine admission.

The secretary-general of the Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations (FSGI), Retno Listyarti, said, however, that the ministry'€™s move had not deterred teachers and students from cheating.

She said the FSGI had discovered several leaked exam questions.

'€œA teacher found leaked Bahasa Indonesia exam questions on the Internet. They thought at first that they were practice questions. However, this teacher then found the exact same questions when supervising the Bahasa Indonesia exam [on Monday],'€ she said on Tuesday.

Retno called on the ministry to immediately investigate the alleged leak.

This year also marks the first time 556 schools will try out a computer-based national exam system that the ministry touted would be more efficient and less prone to cheating.