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More than 5,000 senior high school students had failed their national examinations, the Ministry of National Education said on Monday.

A statement posted on the ministry’s Web site, said of the 59,697 students who took the test, just 54,271 passed, or 91 percent of the total.

By way of comparison, of the 25,562 students from Bali who took the exam, 24,860 passed, or 97 percent of the total.

The national exams — sat by 2.2 million students this year — are typically riddled with corruption and widespread cheating. There are suggestions that Jakarta’s low pass rate was based on a tightening of monitoring, giving students and their teachers less chances to defraud the system.

Some schools on Monday were announcing their exam results on Web sites — using examination enrolment numbers, not personal names — in an effort to prevents convoys of students descending on the schools and destroying their school uniforms by spraying or painting themselves with graffiti.

A vocational high school in Denpasar, Bali, even required students to wear Balinese traditional costumes to school to prevent their uniforms from being destroyed.

Education Minister Mohammad Nuh told Kompas.com that students who had failed the examinations had another two chances to pass.

Nuh said the additional chance was to counter last year’s hysteria when students were only allowed to re-sit the tests once.