Nurfika Osman – Last month, Retno Listyarti served as an exam monitor at a senior high school in North Jakarta. She said that what she observed was mind-boggling.

"On the first day of the exams, none of the students showed up when the exam was due to begin," she recalls. "They arrived at the classroom 10 minutes late, but as soon as they received their answer sheets, they began filling them in without even reading the question sheets."

In the mathematics exam that followed, Retno noticed none of the students had bothered to use the scrap paper provided for making rough calculations.

The incidents immediately raised a red flag for Retno, from the Jakarta Teachers Consensus Forum (FMGJ), who asked the students how they expected to pass the exams without so much as reading the questions.

"They answered 'What do we need the questions for when we already have the answers?'" she says. "They told me they had looked at a copy of the answer sheet in the school's prayer room."

She adds that the students claimed to have obtained the answers from their teachers.

When the exam results were released nationwide later that month, the consequences of the cheating became immediately apparent: dozens of students from the school had failed.

Failed system

Retno says this case and others highlight how entrenched the culture of cheating is among students and teachers, and point to the main failing of the national exam system – that it holds all schools to the same standards regardless of obvious differences in quality of education.

"This is a consequence of having a national exam system where we're imposing the same standards on all schools without looking at their individual circumstances," she says.

Cheating made national headlines recently when it was revealed that the family of a sixth-grader in Surabaya were chased from their home by angry parents for reporting cheating at the boy's school.

The principal and two teachers have since been dismissed for ordering the student to provide answers to his classmates during the exams. Authorities have refused to categorize the case as cheating, however, reasoning that most of the children opted not to use the leaked answers.

"It's a fact that a teacher asked one of the students, Alifah Ahmad Maulana, to feed answers to his classmates during the national exams," said an official with a team set up to investigate the case.

"But most of the students chose not to use the answers given. There's no pattern in the answer sheets that would indicate systematic cheating."

A similar case was also reported at a primary school in South Jakarta. In that incident, the mother of another sixth-grader claimed the school had provided students with answers prior to testing in early May.

She alleged that teachers initially gave answers to a handful of students, then had them distribute the answers to the rest of their classmates via their cellphones.

Arist Merdeka Sirait, chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas Anak), has said such cases were just the tip of the iceberg.

Bizarre backlash

In the wake of the scandals, others have come forward with more allegations.

Kamal Fikri, a former teacher at a vocational school in Cilegon, Banten, says he was dismissed four years earlier after standing up for a student who had reported cheating during exams. He says the backlash against him for trying to uphold the truth was bizarre.

"All the teachers and students at the school strongly despised me for what I did," Kamal says. "They said I was a traitor. They even incited my neighbors to ostracize me, which was going too far."

He adds that students would drive by his home on motorcycles and scream abuse. "But I kept my head in spite of it all because I believed the students had been provoked by the teachers," Kamal says.

He says he finally secured help from nongovernmental groups Indonesia Corruption Watch and the Education Coalition to put an end the hostilities.

Kamal, a teacher for 28 years, now works as a bureaucrat in the National Education Ministry's human resources department. "I'm disappointed that teachers are not upholding honesty, which is a fundamental principle of education," he says.

A lesser evil

Fasli Djalal, the deputy education minister, says that although many see the exams as the main driver of cheating at schools, calls to scrap the system are unreasonable. Indonesia will always need a standardized national exam system, he argues.

"The thing is, most of the teachers in the country lack the intellectual curiosity or commitment to continue improving education in their own schools," he says. As such, he goes on, the national exams are the only way to fairly evaluate students across the country.

Fasli adds that without the exams, only good schools in the better-funded regions would have the resources to conduct the evaluations necessary to improve. Lower-quality schools, meanwhile, would struggle to make any improvements at all.

He also argues that without a national testing standard, the long-ingrained culture of nepotism and graft in the country could see students from wealthy or influential families bribe their way through exams.

He says he is afraid that people who hold positions of power, such as district heads or leaders of state institutions, would bribe teachers in order that their children could pass the school's exams.

"Can you imagine subdistrict or district heads – or even officials in important institutions – bribing teachers so that their students pass the exams?" Fasli says. Can you imagine that happening in most of our schools?

"Indonesia will be left with a shortage of quality future leaders because the [graduating students] will not have been tested to certain standards. They will not be prepared to give their best."