Stop the Unet test. The message is loud and clear from both university students and educators after the National Institute of Educational Testing Service (Niets) announced it would introduce a new national exit exam for all university graduates in the 2015 academic year. The Education Ministry and Niets must listen.
Their reasons for opposing the University National Educational Test (Unet) are manifold and valid.
For starters, Thai students are already expected to sit too many tests organised by Niets, which puts them under stress, and causes financial pressure for parents who pay to put their students through extra tutoring.
These tests make headline news every year for their errors, which deepens doubt and mistrust in Niets.
Worse, the results from compulsory Niets national tests for university admissions are so unreliable that most universities now prefer to recruit their own students directly instead of relying solely on the various tests organised by Niets.
It's not only university student council members who are up in arms against the Unet test. The secretary-general of the Office of the Higher Education Commission Tossaporn Sirisampan is also critical. So are many executives at various universities.
Each different field of studies has its own emphasis on academic and training input. They ask how Niets dare use the same ruler to measure different fields of expertise.
It will not only be a fruitless exercise, they say, but also unfair for the graduates. Niets has yet to answer their question.
If anything, the Unet exit exam idea reflects the country's problematic, exam-obsessed education system. If academic results remain poor, the answer from authorities is to give students more exams that focus on rote-learning.
In a competitive education system judged by exam results, Thai students clock up more than 1,000 hours a year at primary school and more than 1,200 hours in secondary schools. That is among the highest levels of class hours in the world. Yet their school performance remains among the least competitive in the world and in the region.
The way the Education Ministry and the Niets have forged ahead with the Unet exam without consulting stakeholders also reflects top-down, centralised decision-making. It does not solve problems in the system but primarily serves to expand the power of one's organisation.
It is true academic achievement and the performance of schools and universities need to be monitored and evaluated. But we must not forget the goals of evaluation. More importantly, we must not know what problems are preventing us from reaching those goals.
The problem plaguing the education system is not a lack of money. The Education Ministry receives a huge chunk of the budget. But its centralised policy does not respond to local needs or global change, leading to the setting of wrong priorities and education quality lagging.
Any improvement is impossible, however, when schools and teachers continue to be rewarded despite poor students' performance. When teachers are evaluated not by their teaching quality, but by the amount of paperwork they create, how can teaching improve?
Local initiatives are also impossible when schools cannot directly recruit their own teachers to meet local needs. Every policy, every order, every rule and regulation comes from the top with no say from the bottom.
This is why our education system remains rotten. We need to decentralise management, make schools and teachers accountable, and nurture the questioning mind.
We also need to connect schools with needs in the real world. The last thing we need is another Niets test.