Something Wrong With Our Education

They just announced the result of this year's final exam for the senior high schools. Apparently it's better than last year with 99% passing the exam. Sounds great, right?

However, it means that if you scored at least 4 in the scale of 10 in your final exam and as long as you scored at least 8 in every subject at school, you passed the final exam. It is also said that the government still uses the same cut off point of 5.5 of the average of those two scores.

Perhaps it is just me thinking that with score as low as 4, you cant really survived going to the university, assuming you want to go to any higher education. If you have the money to enroll abroad, it is even tougher to compete studying in other language. If you compare average Indonesia high school leavers to their European counterpart, honestly I dont think they can compete eventhough in some European countries the level of education is also declining according to the media. How could you compete with those with higher standard of passing if you are not used to a higher standard? You dont have a good enough basic to begin with.

You cant say that the children are stupider (some is due to their lack of good nutrition in early years) than their European counterpart, because with proper guidance, there are Indonesian kids who won gold medals at international scientific olympiads. Some of these kids are from under privilege background, like these kids from rural Papua, who had bad marks for their subjects. They were selected to get special tutoring, and within months they could compete in an international competition with a great result. It's a proof that the quality of our education and its support is rather patchy. It is getting better, but still not up there. I would love to see that the average Indonesian children could pass their exam with score of at least 5.5 in the scale of 10 easy.