Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) contribute significantly to the development of students' morality, social skills, and emotional characteristics through institutional leadership, educational policies, religious practices, and character development programs. Forgiveness, as a character trait, is often viewed as an individual psychological characteristic. This cross-sectional quantitative study not only explored patterns of forgiveness with respect to participants' gender among the santri but also assessed the quality of a measurement tool, an Indonesian version of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory, using the Rasch model. The participants were 303 santri from pesantren in Java, Indonesia, comprising 87 males and 216 females, with a mean age of 15.18 years. The Enright Forgiveness Inventory was first translated from English into Indonesian and then back-translated into English. In addition, the process of cultural adaptation was carried out to ensure the inventory would be well suited to the Indonesian culture. Finally, pilot testing was also conducted. The data were analysed using Winsteps version 5.1.5. The results showed a person reliability coefficient of 0.83, item reliability of 0.99, Cronbach’s alpha of 0.84, and a person separation index of 2.22. The Rasch measures explained 47.5% of the raw variance. Item difficulty ranged from +4.67 logits for the most difficult item to −1.33 logits for the easiest item, indicating that the inventory covered different levels of the forgiveness construct. The patterns of the person measures were descriptive. Female santri tended to demonstrate higher levels of forgiveness than male santri. These findings support the use of the Indonesian Enright Forgiveness Inventory within a Rasch measurement framework for evaluating character education outcomes. They also give insights into the development of gender-sensitive character education management in the Islamic pesantren system.
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