The Portrait of Madrasah Aliyah In Indonesia: A Critical Evaluation of the Mathematics Score in the National Examination

Madrasah Aliyah (MA) or Islamic senior high school as a part of the national education system plays a big role in advancing the education in Indonesia. There are 7,260 MA institutions with 1,294,776 students. The big potential of MA must be accompanied by some efforts to improve the quality. One of the ways is by capturing and evaluating the quality of MAs through, for example, the results of the National Examination (NE). This study aims to capture the mathematics achievements of students of public MAs and private MAs (mathematics and natural science study stream and social science study stream). The population of the study is all of MA students in Indonesia who took the NE in 2016, with a sample of 291,972 students from 1,455 MAs across 38 districts/cities in East Java. The data of this study are the mathematics scores from the NE and the National Examination Integrity Index (NEII) 2016. The data were analyzed by: (a) determining the average of mathematics scores for each group of MAs (public and private MAs), (b) comparing the average of NE mathematics scores between groups, (c) determining the classification of the MAs based on the number of students and the regions, and (d) comparing the average of 'mathematics scores' in NE with the average scores of NEII for each of MA classification types. The results show that the mathematics achievement of public MA students is higher than the private MAs (for both study stream groups).