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Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. Gloria still can’t quite understand how she failed the recent national exams.

She said her parents were devastated when they heard the results because they had high hopes to send her to Denpasar for higher studies.

Gloria tried to blame it on the police personnel she saw guarding her school, the privately run Christian Vocational School, in downtown Kupang, the provincial capital of East Nusa Tenggara, on exam days.

“Their presence disturbed my concentration because there were so many of them,” the disappointed student said.

But she admitted the exams were really hard.

“The materials were all difficult. I didn’t understand a thing,” she added. “But I will do my best on the make-up test.”

Perhaps the one thing consoling Gloria now is the fact that she will take the make-up exam on Tuesday along with all 161 of her classmates.

The Christian Vocational School is one of 15 in East Nusa Tenggara with a zero pass rate on the junior and senior high school national exams, making it the worst-performing province in the country.

The head of the province’s education agency, Thobias Uly, said only 48 percent, or 16,868 students, passed the exams, out of a total 35,201.

“About 52 percent of students failed the tests,” Thobias said the day after the results were announced on April 26.

Before the exams kicked off, Thobias had said he was optimistic the results this year would be better than last year’s 70.28 percent pass rate.

He said that this year the agency had made better preparations and the local government had paid more attention to the exams by allocating hundreds of millions of rupiah more for extra lessons.

Thobias had said he expected all the extra efforts would pay off with a pass rate of 80 percent.

A Christian Vocational School teacher, Maximus, said he could understand how the province could perform so dismally.

He said he had tried his best to help his students, but given the realities of their learning conditions, it wasn’t all that surprising to learn that none of his students had passed.

“The students barely have any textbooks so how can they learn and review what we teach them at school if they do not have these resources?” he said.

School principal Semi Pah said his school received minimum attention from the local government in terms of infrastructure and teacher training.

“For a vocational school we have a lot of shortcomings. We don’t have facilities to accommodate students’ lessons. Many teachers do not have specialty training either,” Semi said.

The school also could not do much to help its students prepare for the national exams.

It has a very low teacher-student ratio. The school has only four teachers for its 162 high school students, most of whom themselves had finished only high school or a technical vocation school.

Ismail Kasim, the head of the province’s monitoring agency for education quality, said the teacher factor had contributed to the dismal results.

He said that of the province’s 60,603 teachers, 44,977 had just high school diplomas and only 15,626 had undergraduate degrees. “There are a lot of factors to consider when we talk about why we failed in this year’s exams. Students were not well prepared to be familiar with the materials to be tested,” Ismail said.

“To help the situation, in the future the government must be strict with teacher qualifications. Those who do not have undergraduate degrees should not be allowed to teach,” he said.

But it’s not all the government’s fault; there is also the student factor.

“The students were very naughty and lazy this year,” Semi said. “No wonder all of them failed the exams.

“We really had to push them to try to get them to do extra hours of studying the material. Despite out shortcomings we still tried our best to help them, but what if they do not have any motivation to learn?”

At a shop right in front of the school, students were hanging out, gossiping and chatting about football. They expressed little disappointment about the exams.

One of the boys, Goris Takene, the son of a civil servant, said he wanted to be an engineer someday like his uncle.

He too said he could not understand how he failed since he had studied hard and believed his answers were all correct.

But Goris remained unperturbed.

“I don’t take it too seriously because there is the make-up test where we can try once more to improve our results,” he said.