Culture and Education Minister Anies Baswedan said on Tuesday that the government was aiming to achieve higher standards of integrity with the implementation of the national exams (UN) starting in 2016.

To that end, he said the Culture and Education Ministry had produced a barometer, namely the UN Integrity Index (IIUN), which measured the percentage of student answer sheets that showed no sign of cheating.

"We want our children to have high levels of integrity starting from next year," Anies said at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) headquarters on Tuesday.

The minister said the IIUN program was aimed at implementing principles of integrity as a core value, as many schools were striving to achieve good academic scores by any means.

He referred to cheating practices committed by teachers and other school entities, which leaked exam answers to their students to get better scores.

"Such practices must be stopped," Anies said. He said IIUN results would be given to provincial, city and regency administrations. He did not provide further details on the concrete steps the government would take to boost standards of integrity.

Anies said the IIUN results would be made public. He further said the ministry had no plans as yet to apply sanctions on schools that recorded low integrity levels this year but he said it would consider serious sanctions for schools with poor integrity levels in the following years.

In 2015, as many as 503 out of 80,000 schools and Islamic schools recorded high integrity standards in their UN implementation. (ebf)

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