Nadya Natahadibrata, Jakarta – Education experts and campaigners have welcomed the Education and Culture Ministry's decision to scrap the national examination for elementary school students by next year.

The government went further, by ending the practice of ranking students' academic achievements on a report card. Elementary students will only be given descriptive feedback in their evaluations to boost their confidence.

"Measuring a student's performance with a rank is akin to putting them in a box and not letting them fully develop their capacity. Therefore, teachers will be obliged to describe students' grades with narrative feedback, with encouraging words that will not damage their spirits," the ministry's head of curriculum and textbooks, Ramon Mohandas, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Ifa Misbach, an educational psychologist at the Indonesian Education University (UPI), said the decision to eliminate the national exam and ranking system was what educational experts had for a long time hoped to see.

"This is a very positive move by the ministry. A below-standard exam score can affect a child's view of themselves. They see themselves as incompetent," she said. "I just hope the ministry will be consistent in implementing this policy with no other intention but to improve educational quality."

Separately, Retno Listyarti, secretary-general of the Indonesian Teachers Unions Federation (FSGI), said this policy was what many teachers had fought for in the past few years.

"We really appreciate this. For the first time, I agree with the ministry for no longer burdening young children with national exams or ranking their accomplishments. Elementary school students should not yet be thinking about competition," she said.

Around 4.25 million students at 148,361 elementary schools participated in this year's national examinations. However, the experts also said that the ministry should gradually eliminate national exams in junior and senior high schools too, saying that students' final grades should be decided within their schools.

"The national exams are a high-stakes form of testing, where each student faces tremendous pressure not to fail," Retno said.

She added that the implementation of the new policy, obliging elementary school teachers to evaluate students using narrative feedback, would not be easy.

"The number of schoolchildren in Indonesia is far greater than in Europe or many other countries. In state-run schools, we have to teach approximately 30 to 40 children in each classroom; so if one teacher teaches several classes, they may have hundreds of students," she said. "Imagine how we can give each child descriptive feedback. That could take a very long time," she continued.

Ramon said that since the new curriculum was implemented in June this year, the ministry had trained teachers from around 6,000 elementary schools. By next year, they aimed to train teachers in a further 150,000 elementary schools.