T

he student enrollment center at the municipal education and culture office in Bogor, West Java has been visited by the parents of students to report problems in an online enrollment system leading to senior high school students'€™ registration data being unable to be verified.

Bogor Mayor Bima Arya ordered staff members from the communication and information office and the education and culture office to monitor server capacity for 24 hours as some servers had to be repaired due to a hacker attack.

'€œThere were 10,000 hits from one ISP in Bogor, so there are many people messing with the system. We have to anticipate this and focus on technical aspects as most of those registering use the online system,'€ he said.

He added there were 16,572 junior high school graduates seeking places at senior high schools in the city this year and 13,739 had already been admitted, while from Bogor regency there were 4,535 applicants.

There are 18,274 applicants vying for 2,880 seats in state senior high schools and 1,920 seats at state vocational schools.

Kurniawati, 47, a resident of Darmaga, said she had sent the data of her son, Firyali, 10 times to register a seat in state senior high school SMA 1 and SMA 5.

However, receipt of the data could not be verified, so her son, who scored 35.4 out of 40 in his final exams, had yet to be admitted.

Moreover, she said, her son also had the highest biology mark in his junior high school, which could be considered an additional factor for his admission at a state-run senior high school.

'€œThere is no certainty in this online enrollment system. I do not know whether my child'€™s score will increase or stay the same after inputting the additional achievement. I fear he will be leapfrogged by other applicants with higher scores,'€ she said

Nadyavie Rizqya who graduated from state junior high school SMP 5, said she was also concerned with the unclear enrollment system.

'€œBy the time I delivered my online application to state senior high school SMA 6, I was in 17th position in admission test results. Then my position decreased to 52nd. The school did not provide any information on its new student quota. I later found out from the student enrollment center that it was 96,'€ she said.

Ivan Sofyan, 48, said all public schools should announce the quota for their new students so that parents could look for other schools if they knew their children were not admitted.

'€œI'€™ve also registered my son '€” who scored 28.85 in the national exams '€” at state vocational school SMK 1. The total applicants reached 172 and we do not know the school'€™s quota for new students for the 2014-2015 academic year,'€ he said.