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The national examinations for millions of high school students across the country got off to a flying start on Monday despite being dogged by controversy.

No less than Vice President Boediono visited schools in Jakarta and wished the students good luck. He also called on the students not to cheat when taking the tests. 

“I hope the honesty aspect will be maintained as it is very important for the students to have fair and honest results. The results should be objective,” Boediono said. 

He visited State High School SMA 70 and the private Al Azhar, both in South Jakarta. 

Data from the Ministry of National Education show about 2.5 million students are taking the exams, which continue until Thursday. Of these, 41,327 took them last year and are repeating them this year. 

Despite claims in the past of widespread cheating, Boediono hailed the exams as a way to upgrade the country’s educational standards and said it was a national event that people should care about and be grateful for. 

“I really appreciate the teachers, principals and the education minister who have been at schools since early in the morning. I was an educator, and I really want to make the national exams something very useful for the children,” said Boediono, who was a lecturer at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. 

Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo also toured some schools in the morning to monitor the start of the exams. 

National Education Minister Muhammad Nuh said at the Presidential Office that his ministry had minimized the opportunities for cheating this year. 

“This morning I saw the distribution process of the test papers to the schools,” he said. 

“All the standard procedures have been fulfilled. Teachers have been rotated to supervise at other schools because they are not allowed to supervise at their own schools.” 

Djemari Mardapi, head of the National Education Standardization Agency (BSNP), said that overall the first day of the exams had gone well. But there had been a few “minor obstacles” in Bali and Yogyakarta. 

“Those glitches have been taken care of,” he said, without elaborating on the nature of the problems. 

I Gede Jabang, principal of SMA 1 Karangasem in Bali, said his teachers had found that the question sheets did not match what was written on the envelope. 

“For example, there were question sheets for history inside the envelopes for Bahasa Indonesia,” he said. 

The exams were delayed for 25 minutes to sort out the problem. 

Djemari said that in another school the supervisors had not received enough answer sheets for all the students. 

Mansyur Ramli, head of the National Education Ministry’s research and development division, said there had been no reports of exams being delayed, not even in Baleendah subdistrict in Bandung, where flooding submerged houses in the past two days. 

At least 42 students in several high schools in Bandung were delayed by traffic problems caused by the flooding. 

Wiratanu, an exam supervisor at a Baleendah high school, was quoted by Antara news agency as saying the students who arrived late were allowed to join the exams but were not given extra time to finish. 

Ujwalprana Sigit, head of the West Java branch of the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), said his office had prepared an evacuation plan for students during the exam period. 

“We have prepared rubber dinghies if the water rises and roads cannot be accessed by cars,” he said. 

Sigit said the agency also had prepared tents but so far the flooding had not caused any significant damage to the schools. 

“Students at the elementary school at the Dewata tea plantation are still studying in tents,” he said, referring to the area that was hit by a deadly landslide in February. He added that they were taking their exams in tents at the Kanaan plantation, 30 kilometers away. 

Sukemi, an official with the National Education Ministry, said the ministry had received 417 reports about the exams, including complaints about the question sheet mix-up in Bali. 

Most reports concerned the situation at individual schools. 

In Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara, four girls who attend a state vocational high school reportedly did not turn up to take the exams because they are pregnant. 

The school’s deputy principal said the four students had registered to take the exams but later changed their mind due to their pregnancies. 

“We were called by their parents, who told us that their children had dropped out because they were too ashamed to take part in the tests,” he said. 

 

(Eras Poke, Made Arya and Dimas Siregar contributed to the story)