Type of Questions in English National Final Examination

TYPE OF QUESTION IN ENGLISH NATIONAL FINAL EXAMINATION
Written
By
Drs. ASWIR ASTAMAN, M.Pd

1. Background
Human development index of Indonesia is low comparing to the other countries either in Asia more ever the European countries. From 12 Countries of Asia Indonesian Educational Performance, the position of Indonesia is in 12th rank, under Vietnam and Philippines. The government through National Education Department tries to improve this position by trying increase the quality of education. One of the effort of government to increase this is to conduct National Final Examination.
As the matter of fact, the policy to conduct National final examination is contrary to the principle of Competence Based Curriculum which is implemented in form of School Based Curriculum right now in all over Indonesia. The principle of Competence Based Curriculum, the evaluation is in form of Classroom Based Assessment. To give the mark of students is the right of teachers who teach in the class. For this reason many teachers and the ones who involve in education refuse the policy of National Final Examination.
Not all of teachers refuse Final Examination, some them respond positively. National Final Examination is annual activity. It is not new anymore. The teachers at school prepare the students every year. Their experience in preparing the students for National Examination should have been the science that discuss strategy in facing this program. Some of strategies which have been implemented by teachers are class room mapping and introducing the type of questions to students. This paper focus on introducing the type of questions to students to make the easy to understand the item test in National Final Examination.
2. Major Characteristic of the Test
Before we discuss the type of questions in National Final Examination, we should know well the major characteristic of the test. From the item tests that have been tested to students for years, the major characteristic of the final examination tests for SMA are as follows :
a. Main idea of the text/paragraph.
b. Topic of the text.
c. Meaning in context
d. Implicit information
e. Explicit information
f. Language expression
g. Grammatical aspect.
Tests characteristic of SMP are as follows :
a. Main idea
b. Vocabulary
c. Language Expression
d. Implicit information
e. Explicit information
f. Grammatical aspects




- aragraph …
h. Meaning in context- asking the meaning of the word in the text. The questions can be :
3. The word x has similar meaning to …Type of Questions
Each characteristics of the test has its own type of questions:
a. Main idea – The first thing that teacher should explain concerning with main idea, is the understanding about what main idea is, how to find it in the sentence, and its characteristics which can be recognized by students. After they know about this teachers introduce the type of questions related to main idea. Some of the questions are as follows :
- What is the text about ?
- What does the text talk about?
- What is the main idea of paragraph ….?
- What does the text explain about?
- What does the text describe ?
- What is the text mainly discuss about
- The text tells us about
b. Topic-The way how to find topic is almost the same as to find main idea. The difference between the topic and main idea is that, the answers of main idea is sentence but fir topic is in form of word or phrase. The example of the questions are :
- What is the topic of the text
- What is the topic of p
- The underlined word means …
- What does the word in italic means?
c. Implicit information- to find the information that the answers can be found directly from the text. The construction of the text mostly used
wh-questions such as what, when, where, why, how.
d. Explicit information- this type of the text asks student to find the information which the answers can not be found directly from the text. In National Final examination the type of the text mostly :
- Which statement is true based on the text?
- Which of the following is not true according to the text?
- The following statements are true, except…
e. Grammatical aspect
The questions that tested about grammatical aspect existed in almost test items. But since 2004 this type of the questions does not exist anymore because the objective of teaching English focus on language skills not language components.










4. Conclusion
The characteristic of the test and the type of questions explained above are necessary for teachers to explain to the students in order students are familiar with the type of questions in National final examination. The first thing students should understand for answering the questions in the test is to understand the questions. If they do not understand the questions, the possibility to find the correct answers is very small. This is one of trick used by the teacher to make students successful in National final examination.