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Students get high scores by cheating
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(Kompas.com/Abdul Haq) (Kompas.com/Abdul Haq)
An integrity index on the results of this year's junior high school national exam has shown that 50 percent of junior high schools nationwide had poor integrity despite achieving high scores.
The index, which was calculated by the Education and Culture Ministry, also showed that a majority of schools with high scores but low integrity were Islamic junior high schools, at 65 percent, followed by state junior high schools at 55 percent.
On the other end of the spectrum, only 12 percent of junior high schools achieved both a high exam score and a high integrity score.
In May, more than 4.1 million students from 52,163 junior high schools took the national exam.
This year was also the first time several schools gave a computer-based test (CBT). However, only 42 junior high schools gave the CBT, compared to the 514 senior high schools that offered the CBT last month.
SMPN 1 state junior high school in Magelang, Central Java, got the highest integrity index score this year as the ministry gave it 97 out of 100.
Education and Culture Minister Anies Baswedan applauded the school's achievement, saying it proved that students could achieve high scores on exams without cheating.
'The country needs children with high integrity and strong character,' he said, adding that such a high score on the integrity index should not be seen as an anomaly but as a goal for other schools to achieve.
He noted that young students were easily influenced by their surroundings and that teachers and principals also played a major role in being honest role models who were intolerant of foul play.
'Principals have an extremely important role to play. Don't just look at the administrative side; leadership is one of the basis of nurturing integrity,' Anies said.
According to the survey, 70 schools nationwide received an integrity score of 95 and over, which the ministry calls the 'integrity zone'. The top 10 schools are located in Central Java, Yogyakarta and Jakarta.
However, the head of the ministry's Educational Evaluation Center (Puspendik), Nizam, said that about 80 percent of junior high schools nationwide received integrity index scores of under 80.
He also added that this was the first time the ministry had ranked the integrity of junior high schools, unlike senior high schools, which had been scored annually after the national exam since 2010.
'The ministry will use the integrity index and the school reports to evaluate the future national exams,' Nizam said while declining to disclose the method used to measure each school's integrity.
He added that the index had been handed to each individual school and to local education agencies so that they could do their own evaluations to decrease the rate of cheating and encourage students to learn on their own.
'We also hope that schools will work on decreasing cheating rates once they realize that the ministry knows when a school has a high rate,' Nizam said.
Unlike previous years, only one major problem surfaced during this year's junior high school exam, namely the news that an answer key for the Indonesian-language test had circulated among students via text message in Medan, North Sumatra. However, Nizam insisted that the answer key was bogus as the ministry did not produce any until the exams were over.
