Bambang Muryanto, Yogyakarta – An expert urges the Yogyakarta administration to take necessary steps to stop "thesis writing" workshops and their degradation of the education system in the student city of Yogyakarta.

"The Yogyakarta administration should be able to control such illegal practices. However, no institution can take action against this problem," Yogyakarta Education Council chairman Wuryadi told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

According to Wuryadi, "thesis writing" workshops that offered to write their students' thesis or dissertations have been around for a long time. In the absence of an effort to stop the unethical practice, the quality of higher education graduates in the city would continue to worsen, he said.

"We [the council] don't have the authority to take measures against people or institutions who are involved in the illegal practices. What we can do is just to keep conducting various kinds of public advocacy, such as speaking in seminars on the urgent need to tackle this issue," Wuryadi said.

To deal with the problem, Wuryadi, who is also a professor at the Yogyakarta State University (UNY), said lecturers had to be more cautious in giving their students assistance on writing their thesis or dissertations.

"The controlling institution [of the thesis writing process] is the faculty. Lecturers who supervise thesis or dissertations have to be more intensive in following the process of the thesis their students are working on," he said. (ebf)