Citation 1

Human beings are learning organism seeking, organizing, coding, storing and
retrieving information all their lives, building a cognitive structures to continue
learning throughout life (certainly not losing capacity to learn) : continually
seeking meaning (McKeachie, 1988:14)
Citation 2
Intelligence is the capacity inherent in the human brain that is developed
expressed in social and cultural contexts (Gardner, 1999:38)
Citation 3
All children are active learners but they choose which directions to move in. A
child tends to move in directions that have personal meaning and avoids situations
she thinks will lead to failure (Paul, 2003:7)
Citation 4
If learners expect to be evaluated, feel threatened, or feel they are being watched
and checked upon, it is likely that they will study for the sake of the evaluation, to
avoid threatened punishment, or to satisfy the adult watching them and will lose
some inner motivation to learn ffrom their own sake. They may feel they are no
longer learning from choice. (Moon, 2000:23)

Question
Is national examination relevant to the idea announced ?
Answer :
Based on some reasons, national examination is not relevant. Firstly, in national
examination there are subjects that require and determine a high minimum
competency achievement, while other subjects did not specify that high. This
situation becomes unfair for students because every single student has their own
interest in studying and they might be good in different subjects based on their
personal interest. Therefore, judging their ability to graduate or not through
national examination which only consists of 6 subjects in senior high school and 4
subjects in junior high school will be unfair for the students and the result of the
examination itself cannot be used as the representative of the students capability.
Secondly, put the students in national examination which is used as a mean to
determine whether they can graduate or not is simply like giving them a direct
threat. The students will feel threatened because they consciously know that if they
cannot pass the examination they will not be able to continue to the higher
education level. The threat that they feel will lead them to give more concern on
the result which is presented in form of number/score instead of the process of how
they get the score. They will not study because they feel they need it for their life
anymore, instead they will keep studying to accomplish certain score to be able to
graduate from their previous school. This situation also can lead the students to
cheat during the examination to get a good score because it is the natural thing that
kid might do to avoid the failure. They will do everything whether it is good or bad
to achieve a certain goal. Thirdly, Indonesia as a country with more than 17.000
island has different ethnic groups that are too rich and too differ to be unified.
There are many different conditions of school and culture education that cannot be

generalized. Therefore, the ministry should not give the same questions to all
students all over Indonesia, whose schools, teachers and education processes differ
from one another. In other word, the gap between the quality of teaching in urban
and rural areas is still really wide to be evaluated through the same level of
examination. All in all, national examination as the requirements to graduate is not
relevant to be applied in Indonesia.

Written by
Ni Wayan Krisnayanti