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The Supreme Court has upheld a High Court ruling denying an attempt to do away with the national exam. Part of the ruling requires the government to upgrade teaching and school facilities nationwide before conducting another national exam, the director of the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute said on Tuesday.

“The government has lost again. We are going to demand that it comply with the verdict the Supreme Court issued on September 14,” Nurkholis Hidayat said.

Supreme Court rulings are not automatically made public and the September decision was only announced this week.

Nurkholis represents a group of students and parents who filed the lawsuit in 2007 against the government at Central Jakarta District Court, seeking to eliminate the national exam. In the suit, they accused the state of denying the students a right to education because they could not advance to college after failing the test. They said the test was unfair because education standards were not uniform across the country.

An appeal failed and the Jakarta High Court upheld the verdict on Dec. 6, 2007.

Students who filed the suit included those who had reportedly received scholarships but could not take advantage of them because they failed the test.

The Supreme Court verdict held that the president, vice president and the education minister had been lax in their duties to fulfill the human rights of Indonesians who believed they had been victimized as a result of the education system.

Students argue that although they study 13 subjects in all, only three of them — mathematics, Indonesian and English — are tested on the exam. Thus, most students don’t care about the other subjects.

All efforts are devoted to helping students pass the test, rather than focusing on the total education process.

There have been a number of controversies surrounding the national exam, including rampant cheating by students that in some cases is even facilitated by their teachers.

In the most recent exam, supervisors discovered that about 5,000 students from 36 high schools had given the same answers to exam questions. Unfortunately, the answers were wrong.

“The government should evaluate the national education system,” Nurkholis said.

“The ministry should be giving teachers the full authority to decide whether students can graduate or not. It should not be based on the national exams.”

The exam runs counter to the national education law, which states that the authority to evaluate the academic performance of students rests with teachers and schools, not the government.

Mansyur Ramli, the ministry’s director of research, said the number of students that cheated on the exams was small. “Don’t burn the house to kill the rats,” he said.