Scholastic Test for State University Admission
To teach how to think or reason is to prioritize rationality. Like learning to swim, students don't simply learn from the teacher's knowledge, but dive into the pool themselves, to be actively involved.
The Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry has eliminated the previous state university admissions system (SBMPTN). For 2023, there will be no entrance examination for school subjects as before to assess the academic competence of prospective students. It will be replaced with a scholastic aptitude test.
Entrance examinations in the university admissions process, according to Education, Culture, Research and Technology Minister Nadiem Makarim, generally forced schools’ learning programs to focus more on certain school subjects that appeared on the exams, while other non-exam subjects seemed to be viewed as less important. The learning process also tended to resemble a simulation of the exams, drilling students on how to apply smart strategies in tackling the exam questions. This approach has been blamed for the decline in learning quality.
In addition, parents used to feel obliged to enroll their children with informal tutoring institutions, known as Bimbingan Belajar, to boost their children’s chances of being accepted at a university. Students who came from less well-off families might be deprived access to informal tutoring because of the burdensome costs, which would then result in facing more difficulties in competing for admissions to state universities. With the exam now eliminated, students from economically disadvantaged families will have the same opportunities as those from better economic backgrounds.
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The scholastic aptitude test aims to measure students’ cognitive potential, comprising mathematical aptitude, reasoning abilities, reading comprehension in the Indonesian language, and English literacy. They are packaged as a single test.
"The test is not related to memorization, but rather the ability to reason, to solve problems. [The student’s] cognitive potential is seen through the scholastic test," Nadiem said during the launch of episode 22 of the Merdeka Belajar (Freedom to Learn) program: Transformation of State University Entrance Selection (Kompas, 7/9/2022) .
Types of thinking
Reasoning skills, or logical thinking, is generally a cognitive process involving knowledge. In philosophy, there are two main types of reasoning, which are deductive and inductive thinking.
Deductive reasoning involves a process of drawing inferences from general ideas towards a particular or specific conclusion, while inductive reasoning moves from specific observations to general conclusions. Mathematics and language are included in deductive knowledge, while science is inductive knowledge.
The learning process involves different approaches and didactical methods in teaching how to think, or to reason, and teaching to fill the brain.
The brain is considered a vessel that stores materials that can be released at any time.
Filling the brain is primarily a process of depositing facts that are arranged and communicated through classroom subjects. These facts will the become knowledge and be used as material for thinking. In this sense, the brain is considered a vessel that stores materials that can be released at any time. Education like this is called the banking model of education (Freire, Paulo: 1970).
Learning activities, according to Bloom's taxonomy (1956), including knowing, remembering, defining, and understanding, produce a lower order of thinking skills that are linear and difficult to transform into everyday life. In Nadiem's narrative, school activities like this are simply "learning by memorization". Most Indonesian schools have been bogged down by this learning model, which has brought little impact on developing aptitude and reasoning abilities.
To teach how to think or reason is to prioritize rationality. Like learning to swim, students don't simply learn from the teacher's knowledge, but dive into the pool themselves, to be actively involved in giving birth to their own ideas. The teacher’s role is to support the students by providing a classroom environment that is conducive to learning. That is the heart of teaching how to reason.
Article 1, Paragraph (1) of Law No. 20/2003 on the National Education System stipulates learning that prioritizes reasoning skills, “to create a learning environment and process so that students actively develop their potential".
Teachers are required to have the capability to organize a learning environment based on dialogue as a precondition that allows students to express their thoughts. Until today, unfortunately, our teachers have not been prepared well in creating a learning environment that can develop students’ aptitude for thinking.
There are no specific schools in Indonesian primary and secondary education that teaches students to think or reason (scholastically), like the institutions that focus on logic or the laws of thought. Mathematics, Indonesian, and English, which are included in the 2023 SBMPTN scholastic potential test, are taught as knowledge or data to be stored, not as a means to specifically developing thinking or reasoning.
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Apart from talent and natural aptitude, the scholastic abilities students acquire depend on, first and foremost, the approaches and methods used by their teachers in the learning process. A teacher's ability, especially in creating a dialogic classroom environment, will allow students to learn actively by expressing their thoughts and will strengthen their self-confidence. Teachers should be able to stimulate the process of developing thoughts by being willing to listen to their students’ opinions and respecting their ideas.
Learning a subject may require a long time in a noisy classroom, so a teacher must be able to instill discipline by allowing the students to be involved in the learning process through articulating, analyzing, and inferring. The classroom must serve as a place of inquiry that generates various questions that the teacher must respond to positively so as to activate students’ power to think about new ideas, creation, and innovation.
Teachers must refrain from making responses that curtail thinking abilities, such as abruptly cutting off a conversation, immediately agreeing with or refuting students' opinions, and directing what to do without giving the students time to think. An abrupt rebuke from a teacher, along with ridicule or sarcastic comments, will limit the thinking process, undermine self-confidence, and hamper freedom of thought.
Second, students' reasoning abilities are developed based on the models of logic applied in the academic disciplines they study. Studying mathematics and languages (Indonesia, English) will lead students to the potential development of deductive reasoning. The sciences and humanities generate inductive thinking skills. Through studying science, students' reasoning aptitude is guided toward scientific thinking.
Third, at higher education levels, scholastic abilities can be gained and developed through the study of theories and practices in specific academic subjects that deal with logic and the laws of thought. Reasoning and thinking require substance from thought deposits of data in the form the acquired academic (scientific) and nonacademic knowledge.
Thus, even without memorization, knowledge data will automatically become the supporting basis and content of the discourse that confirms the faculty to think. Our education is certainly not meant to prepare a generation of "ignorant" citizens who only think or reason rhetorically without solid knowledge data. Our education should not be heedless, for reasons of "anti-memorization", of the importance of students mastering academic subjects and then be complacent, leaving students to Google and social media.
Scholastic-plus test
The ministry’s policy on its scholastic aptitude test covering mathematics, Indonesian and English, should be supported because it closely relates to the development of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), which are very much needed in our education.
However, the scholastic aptitude test, as far as I know, will be merely a test for assessing deductive reasoning. On the other hand, the potential for scientific-inductive reasoning, which dominates and is indispensable in scientific learning, has missed notice. For the sake of improving this, the scholastic aptitude test must also include academic tests in the natural sciences and social sciences and humanities, according to the student’s chosen program of study. The inclusion of academic tests in assessing scholastic ability is very important, considering that tertiary education is not basic education, and students must be sufficiently equipped with scholastic potential.
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The chosen study programs/majors more or less require a knowledge base as capital that facilitates the next stage in learning. Prospective university students are provided with various choices, and of course they will subjectively choose the field of study in which they are interested and feel they possess knowledge. State universities need to ensure that potential students possess a knowledge base in relation to the chosen study program/major.
The absence of a knowledge base will lead students to experience what schema theory refers to as "cognitive dissonance", because students will not be able to (easily) grasp or integrate new information in the absence of their relevance to prior knowledge. This condition will make it difficult for students to follow their learning process at university and potentially cause them to fail in their studies.
Mohammad Abduhzen, Advisor to the Paramadina Institute for Education Reform (PIER) at Paramadina University, Jakarta
This article was translated by Musthofid.
