Every year, the students of third grade of senior high school face their worst nightmare in their academic career: The National Examination. The graduation on this examination will be the mark for students that finally finish their school and are able to continue to college.
The implementation of National Examination in Indonesia has been a controversy. The raising standard and the difficulty of the test have made some students terrified of this examination. Their anxiety is, of course, reasonable since their whole-year of education is determined by the exam. Some people said that The National Examination is necessary to measure the students’ knowledge and the national education systems’ achievement. Some people, however, said that it should be erased, and there are two reasons for that.
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| National Examination Answer Sheet |
The first reason is that National Examination still has faults in its procedure. The procedure of National Examination requires the students to fill the answer sheet by full-blackening each circle of each number with a 2B pencil. Then the answer sheet will be processed using the computers. Nevertheless, there are some possibilities that technical errors may happen. For example, a student was doing great in the examination, but he or she did not pass because he or she did not use a 2B pencil or did not fully blacken the circles. These possibilities can be overcome by giving instructions of how to blacken the circles to the students or supplying a fair amount of 2B pencils for the students. But the worst possibility that cannot be dealt with is the computer errors in checking the answer sheets. The computers are programmed tools and they almost rarely make mistakes. However, there are always some chances of having errors.
The second reason is that National Examination only reflects the academic qualities of the students. Each student has different qualities from each other. Some have intelligence in school subject, and the other some have talents in other fields. The National Examination is considered not fair because there are so many individual qualities that cannot be measured using this system. For instance, a girl had a talent in dancing traditional dances and she had won several competitions. But because she was not good in math, she failed the examination. This example shows that there is something outside the academic subjects that needs to be considered as well such as talent, creativity, skills, and so on.
As a conclusion, the implementation of National Examination should be erased for good. Not only because the system still lacks of accuracy and effectiveness, but also because it does not covered individual talents and qualities.
