Jakarta – Right now, looking for someone’s higher education background in Indonesia can easily be done anytime and anywhere. The Higher Education Database (PDDikti), which is located within the Pusdatin Iptek Dikti environment (Secretariat of the Directorate General of Higher Education, Ministry of Education and Culture Indonesia), provides easy access for the public to check quickly and concisely through their website at pddikti. kemdikbud.go.id. Anyone can briefly type the name of any Indonesian and quickly see his/her university alma mater, study program, and student number from the search column. It is easy, isn’t it? The PDDikti website also shows several statistics such as a graph of the number of study programs, students by field, and the number of active lecturers based on higher education levels. “Through this website, there is also a concept of data development related to Higher Education. Development that utilizes an inventory of data that is connected to PDDikti management according to the classification of the system and its management function, which as per the duties and functions of the related units internally and externally at the Kemenristekdikti. This is done in the context of integrating higher education data management, ”explained Prof. Ir. Nizam, M.Sc., DIC, Ph.D. on the page covered by the website.
What benefits can we get from this website? One of them is the recruitment team can validate which college and study program the candidate is from. The recruitment team or job providers can check whether the information written in the Curriculum Vitae (CV) matches the actual data. To see the status of the person’s graduation, we can see from the “Current Student Status” whether the status is “Passed”, “Resigned” or something else. Besides, those with a pass status have a diploma certificate number listed on the search results page of the website. The initial status of the student/alumnus can also be checked whether he/she was a new student or a transferred student. If as a transferred student, there will be several names with different universities (this needs to be checked more closely for those with common names).
NOWADAYS IT IS REALLY EASY TO CHECK A PERSON’S HIGHER EDUCATION BACKGROUND IN INDONESIA.
With this information, there is no need for people to be fooled by those who claim to have graduated from certain universities. Especially by those who claim to be from a certain elite university to be accepted in a certain job or company.
However, does graduating from a higher education level reflect the knowledge he or she has? If he graduated, he has passed the passing standards of the educational institution, but that does not mean he is an expert in that field. Checking whether or not someone reflects the field of education should be checked by the recruitment team (in the profiling process). With so many candidates registering, it is not uncommon to prefer the referral methods (both internal and external to be a short way in the recruitment process). The referral method is known to be effective because of 2 things, apart from shortening the recruitment time, the person being referred indirectly has met the referral’s standard of expertise even though he has to go through the recruitment (such as interview) process again.
When this article was posted, we could not see a person’s Grade Point Average (GPA) on the website. However, some universities update their list of courses taken by students (without showing the grade achieved). According to the author, apart from maintaining ethics, GPA does not necessarily reflect a person’s expertise in the courses taken. Many factors are not reflected in a score such as a difficulty level of a given exam, the physical/mental condition of a person when doing the exam, the quality of educators when providing subject matter, educational facilities (which may be inadequate such as the absence of handouts), and various other things. Also, there is some information that cannot be searched on the PDDikti website, such as information for Masters (S2) and higher education and higher education for Indonesian citizens (WNI) abroad. The author conducted several samples of several names whose authors knew they had studied after the undergraduate level (S1) and did not find information about their Masters and Doctoral (S3) education. Checks were also carried out on several names who continued their education abroad. After taking higher education abroad, there is a process for equalising the diploma for students. Until now, this data could not be displayed. The SEI Times team has contacted PDDikti to confirm this, but we still haven’t received a reply until this post is published.
With the digitalization of higher education information, we don’t need to easily believe someone’s statement about their alma mater. And hopefully, with this integration of higher education data processing, the Directorate General of Higher Education in Indonesia can design strategic steps for a better Indonesian higher education.
