For the first time, Indonesia’s education and culture ministry have made plans to conduct their first ever online national exam next year, Techinasia reports.
The national tests will be conducted in school computer labs and submitted via the Internet to a server. This will be trialled in 2015 in select schools in the country. The move is designed to cut the cost of printing the tests, as well as tightening security measures around possible cheating, amounting to a saving of up to US$25 million, or 50 per cent of the usual national exam budget.
The feasibility of such a drastic change has yet to be determined. The ministry team believes that they are making good progress in setting up the school’s computer infrastructure in the Eastern part of Indonesia. All the public schools in Indonesia already have computers.
The biggest problem faced in these online tests is the internet connection. Advantageously, Indonesia’s Telkom aims to set up free Wi-Fi through the IndiSchool project for 300,000 schools in Indonesia by next year. This is designed to cover the majority if not all schools in the country.
The online exam would receive a gradual rollout. Musliar Kaslim, the vice minister of education and culture is saying that the Government will appoint 10 to 30 schools in each province as the location to hold the pilot tests next year. Each school would have different test dates and there will be more versions and variations of the exam papers.
