August 1, 2024
JAKARTA – Many students believe it is acceptable to hire professional substitutes to do their academic work for them, with observers citing societal pressure and lecturers’ teaching methods as factors behind the rise in the use of such services.
The term joki is a catchall word in Indonesia, used to describe individuals offering various services for a fee, in academic terms these services range from sitting exams to ghostwriting assignments and final theses.
University students using such services may be committing academic fraud, an act punishable by two years in prison and a maximum fine of Rp 200 million (US$12,258) under the National Education System Law.
Despite being prohibited by law, for many people the line at which the use of the services of a joki becomes unacceptable appears to be blurred.
Kimberly, 23, a recent graduate from a state university in Malang, East Java, admitted that she paid around Rp 250,000 to a joki to help her create a product prototype from scratch for her mini thesis. But she claimed to have worked on the academic paper for the project by herself.
“I decided to use a joki service because I couldn’t make the prototype by myself,” said Kimberly, who asked to use a pseudonym, on Saturday.
She argued that joki services were only wrong if a student did not understand their work, leaving them unable to answer questions from their lecturers.
“Meanwhile, if students understand their assignments or thesis, but they don’t have time to do them,” Kimberly added, “I think using a joki is somewhat acceptable and common.”
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Extra money
Kimberly is far from being the only person in the country to avail of such services.
The academic joki phenomenon recently made the rounds on social media after Abigail Limuria, cofounder of youth-based media What Is Up Indonesia (WIUI), posted a video on X criticizing how the use of these services was not only common among university students, but that many did not regard it as fraud.
Many social media users decried the phenomenon but others defended the services arguing that the use of a joki was the same as delegating tasks to another person and it was a way for students to earn extra money.
Arsita, for example, recently graduated from a state university in Yogyakarta, and as a joki she could make up to Rp 1.5 million per month.
The 23-year-old first saw an advertisement for academic help on social media, thinking that the service would only involve offering advice to students about their assignments, she signed up to join the service.
“It turned out that I was the one doing the assignments,” said Arsita, who also asked to use a pseudonym.
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She usually charged her clients from Rp 50,000 for simple assignments like math quizzes for middle school students to hundreds of thousands of rupiah for paraphrasing a mini thesis to bypass plagiarism detectors.
“But I stopped offering such services after six months as I found out later that it’s an ethical violation,” Arsita said.
In another case, a joki service founded by Ulum Dita Dynasti, a university student based in Purwokerto, Central Java, reportedly grew into a start-up named Kerjainplis. Its website and social media account was deactivated as of Tuesday, except for its Instagram account @kerjainplis, which was still active but locked for non-followers.
The Instagram account had a link to a LINE messaging account. The Jakarta Post contacted the account on Tuesday, to which the account responded, confirming that the service was still open for business.
Too focused on results
The trend of normalizing academic joki services among students is a result of the Indonesian culture of seeing someone’s worth based on their academic degrees and achievements, according to education expert Agus Suradika.
“Many people still believe that the more academic titles one has, the more they are respected,” he told the Post on Friday. “This is evident by the existence of academic joki among university students, but also among lecturers to gain professorships.”
The government recently faced mounting pressure following a discovery that dozens of professors in Lambung Mangkurat University in South Kalimantan allegedly violated academic ethics by publishing their papers in predatory journals: publications that operate on a pay-to-publish basis with little in the way of peer review and an acceptance rate of nearly 100 percent.
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Agus urged the government to impose strict sanctions on students who were found to have used joki services, while calling on lecturers to become role models for their students in upholding academic ethics.
Fikri Muslim, demographic researcher with the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), argued that lecturers’ teaching methods, which are more focused on results than the learning process, might have contributed to the rise of academic joki.
“There is also pressure from parents to get a cum laude title or graduate quickly,” he added. “This makes students think it’s more important to obtain [good] grades and are not aware of the process.”
He urged lecturers to put more emphasis on the learning process, such as giving individual feedback on each assignment, and including academic writing courses as part of the curriculum.
The Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry’s acting director general on higher education Abdul Haris was not immediately available for comment.