Teaching has long been celebrated as one of the
most noble of all human endeavours a vocation driven by the genuine desire to
nurture the intellectual and social development of young minds. Yet, beneath
this celebrated image lies a far more complex and often troubling reality.
Teachers worldwide, and particularly in the Indonesian context, find themselves
caught in a web of institutional contradictions, administrative expectations,
and systemic pressures that gradually erode their professional identity and well-being.
What happens when a teacher teaches diligently, designs assessments
thoughtfully, marks student work honestly, and still cannot record what
students actually know? What happens when the very act of giving a truthful
grade becomes professionally untenable? This blog explores these questions from
a lived perspective and through the lens of contemporary educational research,
arguing that the burden of teaching in Indonesia is not merely pedagogical it
is structural, ethical, and deeply psychological.
To understand the weight that teachers carry,
it is first necessary to situate teaching within the broader discourse on
occupational stress and burnout. Research consistently identifies teaching as
one of the most psychologically demanding professions in the world. Teaching is
widely recognised as one of the most psychologically and emotionally demanding
professions, subject to both institutional and interpersonal stressors, and
consistently reports higher burnout levels compared to other human service professions.
This is not merely a matter of individual resilience or professional
shortcoming. The source of this burden, as an expanding body of scholarship
confirms, is fundamentally structural.
A landmark study published in *Teaching and
Teacher Education* (an Elsevier journal) by Van Droogenbroeck et al. (2014)
examined 1,878 senior teachers and found that both teaching-related and
non-teaching-related workloads were significant predictors of emotional
exhaustion. Administrative tasks are experienced as a burden, as these tasks
distract teachers from their perceived core job of teaching students, and the
time investment is often considered disproportionate to the benefits for the
student making administrative burdens a main cause of job dissatisfaction among
teachers. This finding resonates deeply with the experience of countless
Indonesian teachers who, far from being permitted to focus on pedagogy, are
required to navigate complex assessment bureaucracies that have little to do
with genuine learning.
More recently, research on what drives teacher
burnout has become increasingly nuanced. The growing demands of assessment,
marking, and data entry, often in order to comply with perceived demands of
accountability systems, are particularly unpopular with teachers, and evidence
from multiple English-speaking countries confirms that time spent on marking is
the single most potent driver of workload stress and diminished workplace
well-being. While this literature emerges primarily from Western contexts, its
central insight that assessment demands can become decoupled from meaningful
pedagogical purpose and begin functioning instead as bureaucratic impositions
is profoundly applicable to Indonesia.
Indonesia's education system presents a
particularly stark case of what might be called the assessment paradox: a
situation in which the elaborate machinery of evaluation fails to produce
meaningful information about student learning. Indonesia's education
performance is among the bottom ten percent of countries worldwide, with
between 55 and 69 percent of Indonesian students performing below the minimum
standards across subjects in 2015. And yet, official grade records within
Indonesian schools rarely reflect this reality.
The gap between actual student performance and
recorded scores is not incidental it is systemic. Indonesian schools operate
under a framework known as the Kriteria Ketuntasan Minimal (KKM), or Minimum
Competency Standard, which sets a threshold below which students are officially
not permitted to fail. Teachers' grading in secondary education has been
recognised as a "hodgepodge" practice that incorporates both
cognitive and non-cognitive factors such as effort, participation, and
attendance to determine students' final grades, rendering those grades an
inaccurate representation of their academic knowledge. What this means in
practice is that a student who scores far below the competency standard is not
failed; instead, the grade is adjusted often without transparency to meet
institutional requirements.
This is the phenomenon scholars have termed
grade inflation, and in Indonesia, it carries a distinctive character. Grade
inflation operates as an unwritten rule for teachers to adjust students' report
grades to meet the KKM, creating what researchers have called a "score
pollution" effect that dilutes the ability of grades to represent a
student's actual grasp of material. The result is a dual reality: official
records that project success, and lived classroom realities that tell a very
different story. Teachers inhabit both of these realities simultaneously, and
the cognitive and moral dissonance this generates constitutes one of the
profession's most underacknowledged burdens.
Standing at the intersection of these
contradictions is the teacher trained to educate, committed to their students,
and yet constrained by structures that undermine both ambitions. The dilemma is
not abstract. A teacher who has invested weeks in designing lessons,
scaffolding content, differentiating instruction, and constructing fair
assessments, only to find that student scores remain far below the expected
standard, faces an impossible choice: record the true score and risk
institutional censure, or adjust the grade and perpetuate a system that
conceals the very problem it should be surfacing.
Teachers acknowledge the dilemma of grade
inflation, where they actually get pressure implicitly from the assessment
system. However, many approach it positively, viewing it as an opportunity to
enhance student abilities though this does not diminish the ethical complexity
of the situation. The moral tension here is real and consequential. On one
hand, accurate grades serve the student's long-term interest by providing
honest diagnostic information. On the other hand, the social and institutional
pressures from administrators expecting high pass rates, from parents
anticipating favourable results, from systemic policies that do not accommodate
genuine failure make honesty a professionally costly act.
Research on teacher burnout confirms that value
conflicts of this nature are among the most potent drivers of cynicism and
emotional exhaustion. Low student motivation and working in a dissonant value
context were the strongest predictors of cynicism among teachers, while time
pressure was the strongest predictor of emotional exhaustion. A dissonant value
context precisely the condition described here, in which the institutional
values embedded in the assessment system conflict with the professional values of
honest, formative teaching does not merely make the job harder. It corrodes the
sense of professional purpose that sustains teachers over time.
One attempted solution to the problem of not
knowing students' real abilities has been the introduction of diagnostic
assessment tests administered at the beginning of a course or semester to map
learners' existing knowledge and identify gaps before instruction begins. In
principle, diagnostic assessment is a pedagogically sound and student-centred
practice. Research published in *Assessing Writing* (Elsevier) acknowledges
that diagnostic assessment is one avenue to provide beneficial information to
teachers, students, and program administrators about students' individual
needs, particularly in contexts where students arrive with widely varying
competencies.
The difficulty, however, is that diagnostic
assessment requires time, design expertise, administration, and interpretation
all of which add to a workload that is already excessive. In a context where
administrative tasks consume teachers' energy, squeeze teaching time, and
create professional stress, which leads to a decline in teaching quality,
adding diagnostic assessment at the beginning of each academic period is not
experienced by most teachers as support it is experienced as yet another demand
placed upon them by a system that consistently asks more without offering more
in return.
This is the cruel paradox of diagnostic
assessment in under-resourced systems: the teachers who most need reliable
information about their students' actual abilities are also the teachers whose
workload least accommodates the labour required to gather it. A teacher who
administers a diagnostic test, analyses the results, adjusts their lesson plans
accordingly, and then discovers six months later that the official grade must
be inflated regardless of what the diagnostic data revealed, has performed
significant additional work for no institutional gain. The knowledge that
grades will be manipulated regardless of evidence removes any systemic
incentive to gather accurate diagnostic information in the first place.
The costs of this system extend in multiple
directions. For students, the most obvious cost is the loss of honest feedback.
Grades serve multiple functions in educational systems: they certify
competency, communicate progress, and provide diagnostic information. When
grades are systematically inflated, they cease to perform any of these
functions reliably. Students who are passed despite not meeting competency
standards are denied the knowledge that they have not yet met those standards
knowledge that might motivate additional effort, remediation, or a
reconsideration of educational pathways.
For teachers, the costs are different but no
less serious. A growing body of evidence published in Elsevier journals
including *Teaching and Teacher Education* confirms that teachers who
experience persistent misalignment between professional effort and institutional
reward are at significantly elevated risk of burnout. High workload and
insufficient social support were identified in 75% of studies as significant
predictors of emotional exhaustion among teachers globally. In the Indonesian
context, the particular form of workload that generates this exhaustion is not
only the volume of tasks but also their futility the sense that careful
assessment leads nowhere, that accurate scoring is overwritten, and that
diagnostic labour is unsupported by institutional action.
Key factors contributing to teacher burnout
include excessive workload, emotional labour, and institutional pressures, and
Indonesia exemplifies all three. The teacher who teaches, assesses, diagnoses,
and still cannot record what their students know has been asked to perform
labour that the institution simultaneously demands and renders meaningless.
This is not a sustainable professional condition.
The burden of being a teacher in Indonesia is
not simply a matter of hard work. It is a matter of structural contradiction.
Teachers are asked to educate students whose real learning levels are masked by
inflated grades. They are asked to assess honestly while working within systems
that make honesty professionally risky. They are asked to conduct diagnostic
assessments to understand their students, in contexts where those assessments
carry no institutional consequence because final grades will be adjusted regardless.
And they are asked to do all of this while managing the emotional, cognitive,
and administrative demands of a profession that is, by any international
measure, already among the most demanding.
What is needed is not more assessment. What is
needed is a fundamental rethinking of what assessment is for. If grades are to
mean anything if they are to serve students, inform teachers, guide
institutions, and support the national goal of quality education they must be
permitted to tell the truth. This requires institutional cultures that treat
honest assessment not as a threat but as the starting point of real educational
improvement. It requires workload frameworks that make diagnostic assessment feasible,
not punitive. And it requires policy environments that acknowledge grade
inflation not as a harmless administrative convention, but as a systemic
failure that costs students their futures and costs teachers their professional
integrity and well-being.
Until Indonesian education policy takes seriously the structural roots of teacher burden the unwritten rules, the inflated grades, the accountability systems that reward appearances over outcomes the teachers within that system will continue to carry a weight that no amount of individual dedication can fully offset.
References
Arrafii, M. A. (2020). Grades and grade inflation: Exploring teachers' grading practices in Indonesian EFL secondary school classrooms. *Pedagogy, Culture & Society*, *28*(3), 409–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2019.1663246
Qayyum, R. (2024). A teacher's inquiry into diagnostic assessment in an EAP writing course. *Assessing Writing*, *51*, Article 100594. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2024.100594
Skaalvik, E. M., & Skaalvik, S. (2020). Teacher burnout: Relations between dimensions of burnout, perceived school context, job satisfaction and motivation for teaching. A longitudinal study. *Professional Development in Education*, *48*(4), 594–606. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2021.1913404
Van Droogenbroeck, F., Spruyt, B., & Vanroelen, C. (2014). Burnout among senior teachers: Investigating the role of workload and interpersonal relationships at work. *Teaching and Teacher Education*, *43*, 99–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2014.07.005
Viac, C., & Fraser, P. (2025). Teacher job satisfaction: International evidence on the role of school working conditions and teacher characteristics. *Teaching and Teacher Education*, *160*, Article 104814. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2025.104814
Wibowo, E. P., Lestari, A., Adrian, M., Firdausiyah, K. S., Islamiy, J. H., Putri, R. D., Kemal, T., & Kurniawan, E. (2024). Exploring the ethical dimensions of testing and assessment: An investigation into grade inflation among EFL teachers. *OKARA: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra*, *18*(1), 71–97. https://doi.org/10.19105/ojbs.v18i1.12676
Wills, G., & Grasby, K. (2022). When is high workload bad for teacher wellbeing? Accounting for the non-linear contribution of specific teaching tasks. *Teaching and Teacher Education*, *113*, Article 103665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103665
Zamora-Polo, F., Sánchez-Martín, J., Luque-Sendra, A., & Aguayo-González, F. (2025). Five decades of teacher burnout research (1970–2024): A comprehensive bibliometric analysis. *Acta Psychologica*, *254*, Article 104793. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.104793
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