Dessy Sagita – Allowing students who fail national exams to retake the tests will not resolve the problem of rampant cheating, a noted education expert said on Monday.

Utomo Danajaya, a director at Paramadina University's Institute of Educational Reform in South Jakarta, expressed his doubts over plans by the National Education Standardization Agency (BSNP) to arrange for students who failed or missed national exams to be given a second chance. He said this was not the best option to guarantee "honest" national exam grades and secure higher pass rates.

Mungin Eddy Wibowo, a member of the agency, said on Monday that students who failed deserved to be given a second chance to pass the exams.

"We want to give them the hope that if they fail the exam, they will still be able to fix this," Mungin said, adding that national exams were intimidating and a cause of extreme frustration for students, with some going as far as attempting to commit suicide.

He said with so much emphasis put on the national exams, many student felt they had to cheat in order to secure a passing grade.

Cheating scandals have been a part of the national exams for years. The most recent one, in June, is believed to have involved thousands of students across the country.

Utomo, however, said that allowing students to retake exams would not guarantee an end to the cheating. "I am betting that in spite of the resits, rampant cheating will still happen because this is something that is deeply entrenched in the structure of our education system," he said.

Utomo said the national exams put the students, their parents and teachers under a tremendous amount of stress, to the extent that students were willing to do anything to pass, including making arrangements to systematically cheat. "This is exactly what happened in last June's scandal," Utomo said.

In this recent scandal, university supervisors for the exams discovered that an estimated 5,000 students from 36 high schools had given the exact same incorrect answers to national examination questions.

The supervisors suspected the students had used incorrect answer keys supplied by unidentified sources, possibly with assistance from teachers or school administrators. The BSNP eventually annulled the first national exam results for the students involved and organized makeup tests.

Utomo said as long as national exams were considered the only measure to determine whether or not a student deserved to graduate, dishonesty and frustration would always be a part of education in the country.

He said national exams should be used only as a tool to measure the quality of education. Exams, he said, should be taken by students in the early years of high school and not toward the end.

"It would be better if the national exams were taken by students in the first or second year of high school," Utomo said. "They should know that the exams are given as a measure of the education standards they can expect at the school. Graduating from high school should be determined by those teaching at the school, and not the state."

According to data from the BSNP, the state senior high school passing rate this year was 91.4 percent, or 3.7 percentage points lower than the 95.1 percent pass rate for private schools. In the 2008 national exams, the state senior high school pass rate was 88.9 percent while private schools achieved 92.9 percent.

Indonesia's national high school final examinations are renowned for their failure to gauge a student's preparedness for university education, as stated in earlier press reports. Because of rampant cheating, the credibility of the national exams have been thrown further into doubt.

Meanwhile, every year, thousands of students take part in state university entrance exams.

Minister of Education Mohammad Nuh wants to phase out these university entrance exams and instead use the national high school final exams as the sole barometer for entry into tertiary education.

By 2012, under the proposed plan, high school students would only have to present their high school national final exam scores to apply for university.