Materi debat

National exam becomes the hot topic in most of discussions among students, teachers, and parents.
Some people believe that national exam is no
t necessary for students as a requirement to be able graduate from a school. In other hand, other
people see national exam as an important indicator to know whether students have mastered all school
materials or not. The debate among society about national examination goes on until now.

For people who agree, national exam is necessary for students as a requirement to graduate from a
school. People who support the national exam explain that the quality of the Indonesia education will
drop without the national exam, so they try to defend the current system. They also think that national
examination can motivate students to study harder.

However there are people who disagree with the opinion. Those who against this national exam kept in
school education say that it doesn’t need the national exams because the quality of education does not
just depend on the national exam. Further, the national exam only measures a small portion of students’
competence in specific subjects, and does not measure students’ competences throughout the
semester.

In conclusion, national examination can still be useful as an instrument to evaluate or detect the level of
students’ cognitive competence in several subjects, on a national scale. However, it is not fair if only
national exam score that judge whether students pass or not. Government should make a regulation
that national exam is not the only requirement for students to graduate. There should be other
requirements added such as students’ daily score, behavior, and achievement.

Ujian Nasional: Pro dan Kontra

Ujian nasional menjadi topic panas di banyak disuksi antar siswa, guru dan orang tua. Beberapa orang
percaya bahwa ujuan nasional itu tidak diperlukan untuk siswa sebagai sebuah syarat untuk bisa lulus
dari sekolah. Di lain sisi, orang melihat ujian nasional sebagai idikator penting untuk mengethaui apakah
siswa telah menguasai semua materi sekolah atau tidak. Perdebatan di tengah-tengah masyarakat
tersebut tentang ujian nasional masih berlanjut sampai sekarang.

Bagi orang yang setuju, ujian nasional itu diperlukan untuk siswa sebagai sebuah syarat untuk lulus dari
sekolah. Orang-orang yang setuju akan ujian nasional menjelaskan bahwa kualitas pendidikan Indonesia
akan jatuh tanpa adanya ujuan nasional, oleh karenanya mereka mencoba mempertahankan sistem
yang sekarang. Mereka juga berpikir bahwa ujian nasional bida memotivasi siswa untuk belajar lebih
keras.

Akan tetapi terdapat orang-orang yang tidak setuju dengan pendapat tersebut. Mereka yang menolak
ujian nasional tetap diadakan di sekolah mengatakan bahwa sekolah tidak membutuhkan ujian nasional
karena kualitas pendidikan tidak hanya bergantung pada ujuan nasional semata. Lebih lanjut, ujian
nasional hanya mengukur sebagian kecil kometensi siswa pada mata pelajaran tertentu, dan tidak
mengukur kometensi siswa secara keseluruhan dalam satu semester.

Kesimpulannya, ujian nasional masih bisa bermanfaat sebagai alat untuk mengevaluasi atau mendeteksi
level kompetensi kognitif siswa di beberapa mata pelajaran pada skala nasional. Akan tetapi, tidak adil
rasanya jika hanya nilai ujian nasional saja yang digunakan untuk menentukan apakah siswa itu lulus apa
tidak. Pemerintah harus membuat peraturan tentang ujian nasional tidak lagi sebagai satu-satunya
syarat untuk kelulusan siswa. Harus ada syarat lainnya seperti nilai harian siswa, perilaku, dan prestasi.
Waste of time, and anachronistic
Exams and grades the two most dreaded words any students with any self respect dreads to hear.
Why? Because they are waste of time, and anchoronistic in todays society. The main reason
exams are waste of time is the fact that large majority of them are memory text only and any one
with basic knowlege on how human mind works that memory's divided into long term memory
and short time memory. Firstly when students studies for exams they usually ends up putting lot
of information they intake in short period of time leading up to the exam on on the short
memory, thus they will forget most if not all of it within minutes or hours after they have handed
in the exam. As the brain with consider these infromation redundant. When a studient know he
has to memorize large amount of information in short period of time, he will also be worried if
he will remember all these information he has aquired during the exams, which can cause various
form of mental blocks. Such as don't remember what was "learned" prior to the exam then
remember soon as exam is over and has been handed in. Resulting in lower grade, or student not
performng at all on the test and freak out causing serious distress and mental health effects.
Because students will be more worried about the grade they get than what they actuall learn, thus
not having any actual knowledge of the source material despite what the grade say. The student
that score only minimal passing grade or even fail grade might somtimes even be the one that has
much more knowledge on the source material on the whole than the person that scored the
highest grade. As exam cannot and will not cover the entry course subject matter then you would
need much longer exam than 60 min - 240 min depending on if you are in elementry school, high
school or collage. Thus exam are not fit for the purpose of ranking students by knowledge or
skills. Big final Exam should abolished.

I strongly disagree with exams

Exams do not provide the best possible way for students to retain information. What ends up
happening is they learn of pages of information for their exam and end up forgetting it after.
Personally I think that continuous assessment would rid of this problem and cause students to
properly commit the information to memory. Therefore it is a more appropriate from of assessing
students preformance.As one hears the idea of abolishing tests, something that has become a
staple in nearly every publicly-funded school's curriculum, he or she might act in disdain and
form an opinion without considering the other side. I ask, dear reader, that you do not fall into
this. Continuing the long-standing incorporation of test would be nothing short of counter
productive and illogical.
First, consider the goal of an exam: to see how much a student knows about a topic. However, it
is a well-known fact that tests are poor at measuring this, proven by a quick search on Google.
Along with that, the fact that student's review in the form of studying before an exam renders the
true results null. The score of the test is no longer a form of assessment but a counter for the
"points" of school, no different than a ball game. A teacher might award extra credit for trivial
matters, skewing the actual result further, or take off for something like poor calligraphy or poor
grammar in unrelated areas. This is strongly, strongly illogical.
See also how the tests fail in achieving their stated goal. An exam is known for the high levels of
stress and anxiety that accompany it. Just look at the Chinese or Japanese Placement Exams or
the SAT/ACT. The ones who score better are not smarter or even better suited, they just
happened to handle pressure better. This can be linked to another issue: a test is a single
assessment. If a student happens to score poorly due to a bad situation outside of school, the
exam no longer is a good index of how well a student knows the material. Yet, the world
continues to trot along, smiling with ignorance.
An exam has become perverted from the original goal, the score of a children's game with
unnaturally high stakes. However, the astute reader may wonder, "If we don't have tests, how
could we measuring learning and growth?" This can be answered by the example of another
learning-based activity: private musical tutoring. Very rarely does private tutor give an
assessment to determine the skill; they simply learn. And that is what school should be like:
learning for the sake of learning.