Schools nowadays absorb much of students’ time.
With national
exams (UN) waiting for them in their senior years, they have to sit
longer hours at school and undertake extra classes.
Some schools
give additional learning time to students who have not mastered the
material, while others oblige them to join additional classes several
months before exams.
Piled up with extra sessions outside school, students can spend almost
12 hours a day on school subjects in their final years of junior and
senior high school.
Some students even increase their hours at earlier stages.
Clarinda
Reyzihanifa spends around eight-and-a-half hours at school and some
four hours to beat the traffic jam during weekdays. The 11th grader has
to arrive at her school, state high school SMA 24, in Sena-yan, Central
Jakarta, at 6:30 a.m.
She goes home at 3 p.m. and usually reaches home in Pondok Cabe, Tangerang, at 5:30 p.m.
In the evening, she usually studies for one-and-a-half hours. Sometimes she will spend more hours on completing her homework.
“Yes,
I am tired, but I kind of get used to this schedule because I have been
doing this since I was in 10th grade,” she told The Jakarta Post.
She
plans to take a private course in chemistry in the next two months in a
bid to prepare herself to face the national exams and next year’s
school exams.
Another student, Farah Andani, says she often
sleeps at 1:30 a.m. due to mounting homework. She complains that some
teachers suddenly give her many tasks to complete in a short time
instead of gradually giving a more manageable amount of tasks.
“When
I have not mastered the given tasks, I will just copy my friends’ work.
I wish we spent more quality time in the classroom on discussing
difficult subjects like biology,” she said.
Since the government
implemented in 2004 a “fail system” for students who achieved lower
than the minimum UN grades, the fear to fail has increased sharply along
with sparking controversy.
Those who fail are required to take another senior year or equivalency tests.
The
government has argued that the punitive system is necessary for
students to motivate them to perform and in the end improve the quality
of education.
Despite the rising average grades achieved across the years, the country’s education profile remains the same.
Eastern
Indonesia and disadvantaged provinces still lag behind the national
standard despite the national examination system being designed to
improve the quality of education.
National examination results in
2008-2009 showed a high failure rate among high school students
nationwide, with underdeveloped areas, such as East Nusa Tenggara,
Central Sulawesi, North Maluku, West Papua and Central Kalimantan,
ranking at the bottom of the list.
With many policy changes, the
government has maintained the percentage of failing students below 1
percent, but the nightmare that has now lasted for almost a decade still
haunts students, parents and teachers.
Last year, 20,234 or
0.55 percent of junior high school students throughout the nation failed
the examination. The number of senior high school students who failed
was 11,443 or 0.78 percent.
In April this year, 3.7 million
junior high school students are sitting the UN, while more than 2.5
million senior high school students are participating in the national
exams.