Schools and Nation-building (Part 2)

Part 2 of the article written in June 2007.

As pointed out in Schools and Nation-building, the primary education in Malaysia is by nature racially segregated, which comprised of national, vernacular Chinese and Tamil schools.

The segregated primary education was a compromise negotiated among the ethnic groups when Malaya gained its independence in 1957. After 50 years of independence, the national schools had became the point of criticism and the student enrolment were predominantly Malays while Chinese parents preferred to sent their children to Chinese primary schools. This resulted in a worsening situation of segregation among the ethnic groups.

In order for schools to play a greater role in nation-building and fostering racial harmony, thorough revamp of the education system seems to be an unavoidable initiatives. To the general understanding, Chinese and Indian students in the vernacular schools received their primary education in a mixture of their mother-tongue along with Malay and English. The students in the national schools were taught in Malay and English with the Muslim students being taught Arabian.

As all students were expected to master 3 languages, perhaps the revamp of the education system could integrate the primary education into a common schools. All students are required to learn Malay language and English language while the remaining subjects are conducted in English. In addition to that, Malay students should be taught Arabian as the third language while Chinese and Indians studied Chinese language and Tamil respectively. To further ensure greater objectivity in the evaluation of students' achievement, the third language should be given a lighter weightage as compared to Malay and English.

With a united education system, then primary and secondary schools could played a greater role in enhancing nation-building and racial harmony among the students. Then it could truly reflects that education is indeed an investment that will produce the next generation of Malaysians that are truly Bangsa Malaysia.

P/s: This article was reproduced without any correction or amendment. There are lots of grammatical mistake.

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Schools and Nation-building (Part 1)

A reproduction of an article written in June 2007 from my blog about single-stream education. This is the first part of the two-part article.

Racial integration among university graduates is said to be an alarming concern of racial harmony in Malaysia. It was indeed true that the segregation of students according to ethnic groups has been happening in public and private universities. The Minister of Higher Education has also highlighted the issue when he spoke about the "Khidmat Masyarakat" (Community Service) programme.
I would viewed that the severity of the issue at the tertiary institutions as merely the consequences of failure in the education system to address the nation-building and racial integration agenda. University students spent on average 12-13 years of education before stepping into universities. Therefore addressing the issue at tertiary level might not yield such an effective outcome as compared to tackling the issue from the root of it, which is the primary and secondary education.

Observing from the current scenario in the country seems to have swayed into a contradicting direction. The national schools were predominantly Malays while the Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools were almost exclusively Chinese and Indians respectively. Students from the three major ethnic groups in Malaysia do not seem to have the opportunity to interact and understand each other. Without doubt, the segregation of 12-13 years will eventually continue at the tertiary level. It would be a little over-optimistic if the integration could done within merely 3-4 years after so many years of segregation. Therefore, in long-run, the country as a whole will have to bear the consequences of racial segregation in the society.

If the country is serious in combating the problem, the major effort should be channelled to the primary and secondary education instead of tertiary to rectify the issue. Thorough revamp of the education system is much needed as the current primary education by nature is racially segregated. How could an education system driven by mother-tongues produced students with tolerance towards racial harmony? After all, education is said as an investment that will only yield its return from the subsequent generation.

P/S: This article is not against mother-tongue education. Further elaboration on the role of mother-tongues and national schools will followed in the subsequent article.

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Shouldn't go to university?

There was a recent article in the Times newspaper that argues why people shouldn't go to university. In response to the article, a friend shared the following:

"Recently my friend who is mechanical engineer at aircond factory at Bangi earning 3k decided to resign and open a supermarket back at his hometown, i am thinking, hmm... maybe he should work in supermarket after SPM instead..." (by Tim L.)

Briefly, the story was about a mechanical engineer who was earning an average monthly wage of a university graduate, decided to quit the job in the city and returned to his hometown to start a supermarket. My friend who shared the story, then, argues that it might be better for the "engineer" to venture into the supermarket business immediately after secondary school, instead of going to university.

To many of us, this story seems to be rather familiar. Many university graduates, especially in Malaysia, do not venture into the careers that are expected of them. More often during such discussion, issues such as graduate unemployment, graduate employability as well as the standard of our tertiary education will subsequently be raised.

However, this article attempts to look at this story from a slightly different perspective. While reading the story for the first time, a question immediately came to my mind.

"If this person is "destined" to venture into a supermarket business, how would university education makes a difference to his career?"

I guess, if we are to evaluate this question in relations to the story, our answer will likely to be guided by how we understand university education.

If we take the cost-benefit approach, certainly, the cost will exceed the benefit. The cost will not only include the tuition fees to pursue a degree, but also includes the opportunity costs, i.e. earnings that were foregone while studying and, the possible "experiences" and "opportunities" of working in the supermarket earlier; yet, the "tangible" benefits remain relatively unchanged.

If we assume university education as a form of credential that only leads into the related careers, expectedly, we are likely to argue that university education in such situation is unnecessary.

However, if we return to the basic idea of university education, which is a form of intellectual training and development, then confidently, we can argue that university education will indeed makes a different to the person as a whole.

University education is not only the certificate that one receives at the end of the course or the number of A's that one scores in exams, but rather, it is "the education and training" to become an intellectual person, which can be defined as a person who uses his/her intelligence and analytical thinking, either in a professional capacity or for personal reasons. In the book titled "Knowledge and Decisions", intellectual was also used to mean an individual whose profession solely involves the dissemination and/or production of ideas, as opposed to producing products or services. Briefly, university education could be regarded as a form of training to produce intellectuals, which are then expected to translate their intellectuality into all aspects of life.

It is clear that only through understanding the role of university education, as a form of intellectual training, we could convincingly argue that it remains worthwhile to pursue university education regardless of the career aspiration. This also explains why courses, such as philosophy, classics, literature, languages, history and theology, are relevant and remain as an essential part of the university, despite their practicalities and applicabilities are being challenged.

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University Ranking

Welcome back to the exciting month of university ranking again. Every year during this period, higher education institutions around the world capture headlines like never before. There will be joy for some institutions, setbacks for others and, worse still, these news and rankings might even cost some academics to lose their job. The stacks of university ranking are increasing tremendously. What does this means for the higher education sector?

Without doubt, university ranking has become an important component of higher education sector. Initially, these rankings were suppose to provide a comparative benchmark among higher education institutions as a way to ensure that quality is uphold. However, with all the publicity associated to these university rankings, it has become a rat-race among institutions to compete among one another for a better standing in the ranking. Today, institutions have to compete not only with institutions within the same country, but the competition has expanded both regionally and internationally. One might wonder, "is this truly a competition of quality" or merely, "a competition for competition's sake".

Owing to the different rankings, institutions are evaluated with a different set of criteria in each of the ranking. Some placed more importance on peer-evaluation, research funding, publication, international reputation, while others include other criteria such as staff-student ratio or graduate employment. Although most of these rankings measure different criteria, however, when it comes to reporting the findings to the public, all these differences are masked together with statistical weightages and indices to reflect the "quality" of the institutions. In other words, the public is made to believe that University A is better than University B, simply because A ranked higher than B in a ranking. However, many fail to ask, "what makes A ranked higher than B?"

This leads us to ask two more questions:
"What are the important criteria to measure quality in higher education?"
"Who should decide the components to be evaluated?"

Generally, a university has two major responsibilities: teaching and research. Does this means that quality of higher education institutions should be based solely on these responsibilities. This might not be the case. For example in the World University Ranking (THE-QS), the ranking is computed based on the following criteria: academic peer review (40%), staff-student ratio (20%), research excellence (20%), international faculty (10%), international students (10%) and employer review (10%). Is this the "correct" ratio to indicate quality?

On top of that, who actually determines that this is the "correct" ratio to measure quality? Are all the institutions being evaluated agreeable to the "ratio"? Furthermore, is this the appropriate ratio to measure higher education institutions around the world? Certainly, we cannot expect universities in US and UK to be evaluated on the exact same criteria as universities in the developing countries.

Evaluating further the components in the tabulation of these ranking, there are several "questionable" indicators that could challenge the reliability and validity of these rankings. For example in THE-QS ranking, the research excellence criterion (20%) is based on citations, which measures how many times an academic's published work is cited. We ought to take into consideration that in the academia, published work is a form of academic debate. Therefore, there might be a possibility that when someone's work is cited, it does not necessarily indicate that the work is excellence. On the contrary, some shabby and questionable research could also be cited (in a bad and negative way) and challenged. Sadly but true, both excellence and terrible research will be measured equally in tabulating the ranking.

Regarding the teaching quality of universities, the proxy measurement used is the staff-student ratio. In other words, the ideal ratio will be that a university has a large faculty base and small student population. Such a measure, expectedly, will favours the research-driven universities. Although theoretically, a low staff-student ratio is ideal, nevertheless, educational research about class size have not been able to proof the theory right. So in other words, having a low ratio does not necessary guarantee teaching quality. On the contrary, there has been many instances that teaching quality in research-driven universities are being questioned, whereby academics consider teaching as secondary or even, "unnecessary burden". After all, "opportunity cost" do not exist in economics for no reason.

Although the issue of university ranking has, today, become a publicity gimmick that captures the public's attention towards higher education, nonetheless, this once a year limelight provides a perfect opportunity for higher education institutions around the world to take a moment and ponder about the important question of quality. Academia should not be competing for the sake of competition, but rather, be committed to compete for the sake of upholding the true quality of higher education.

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Is this Academic Bribery?

One unique feature of the continuous assessment regime in higher education is to evaluate students not solely through their performance in the final exam, but also through other evaluation indicators throughout the course. Typically, the final exam will comprises of 30-70 percent of the final grade, while the remaining percentage are awarded to the students in the form of continuous assessment.

The common evaluation methods used as continuous assessment are certain percentages of the final grade to be allocated for the mid-term exams, tutorial exercises and assignments. However, in most cases, students' attendance will also be given a small percentage, such as 5 or 10 percent. In Malaysian universities, such practice of awarding a certain percentage for students' attendance is very common.

This is where the controversy begins. Is awarding students solely for their attendance a form of academic bribery?

The argument that supports for such allocation argues that students need to be incentivise to attend lectures and tutorials. Furthermore, it was also argued that with such incentive, students will come to lectures and tutorials more prepared and, lecturers are assured of an audience.

On the other hand, critics argue that by awarding students solely for their attendance is a form of bribery that helps student to score higher marks, without any contribution to the intellectual development of the students. (For more arguments, read report).

Is this a form of academic bribery? A point worth pondering.

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Plagiarism

Malaysian academics were once again in the news for the wrong reason. Two lecturers were caught plagiarising materials from the Internet to produce a guide book. The punishments for their action include a stern warning that would be included in their service records and they have to return any royalty received for the book. So far, only a politician, who was formerly a professor, has called for the lecturers to be sacked, citing that "plagiarism is the most serious crime in a university".

What exactly is plagiarism? It is defined as a practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. More specifically, plagiarism within academia is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud. No doubt, plagiarism is a serious crime, but what is surprising with this incident was the lack of response from fellow academicians in the country and the public in general.

Is the lack of response due to the fact that such act is common?

From my own experience studying in a Malaysian public university, plagiarism or "partial-plagiarism" is quite a common phenomena. I remembered a core course in my second-year, where the lecturer, a very senior academic and held influential position in the department, "suggests" that all students in the course to purchase the course textbook, which was in Malay. The price of the book was RM10, but was "photocopied" and bind into a book form. Upon reading the book, readers will realise that all diagrams and figures in the book was "copy-and-paste", as the diagrams are worded in English, while the description and the texts are in Malay. Out of curiosity, a fellow coursemate began to search all textbooks and found the original version. When compared, it was obvious that every sentence of the Malay textbook was "literarily" translated and the diagrams and figures were "copy-and-paste" directly from the English version. The "author" to the Malay textbook is the lecturer and no acknowledgement whatsoever could be found that indicate that the Malay textbook was translated or cited from the English textbook.

Is that not plagiarism? Sadly, this is just one of the many incidents that I came across.

On the other hand, as an undergraduate student, I have to admit that we were not given any training to avoid plagiarism, or simply informed what is it all about. There was only one module that taught us how to cite references and perfectly list the references in the bibliography. However, the essence of citation and how to avoid plagiarism remains much a mystery.

How I came to know about plagiarism? I was privilege to have a lecturer, who failed one of my assignments, but later, explained what went wrong and taught me the essence of plagiarism and what it meant by citation and references. If not for the "education" of this lecturer, I might have graduated with a university degree without any hint of what plagiarism is all about.

Clearly, as a way to tackle plagiarism, proper education needs to be given to the students, teaching them what exactly is plagiarism and how to avoid it. On the other hand, strict and stern action is needed to punish those who knows, but yet, plagiarise. After all, plagiarism is a "criminal" act in the academia, very much alike stealing as a criminal act in the society.

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The Making of "Diploma Disease"

The economy is in recession. As part of the stimulus package, tuition fees and research grants were offered to postgraduate students to pursue a PhD or Master's programme locally. Clearly, a strong push factor for graduates to pursue a postgraduate degree, at virtually zero monetary cost. The only cost is probably the opportunity cost of not working in the labour market.

On the other hand, among the many key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess and evaluate academic staffs in public universities, one of the KPI is the number of postgraduate students supervised. Such a KPI provides the necessary incentive for academic staffs to accept as many as possible postgraduate students. For the graduates, this is an indirect pull factor.

Along with the problem of graduate unemployment, these are perfect ingredients for the making of "Diploma Disease". Such phenomenon happens when the number of holders for a qualification increases, and thus, reduces the value of the qualification as an indicator of one's academic ability. As a result, there will be an increasing demand for higher levels of qualification.

We might need to ask that with these developments, will it happen that one day, Bachelor degrees are worthless in Malaysia, and the necessary university qualification is the Ph.D. We certainly hope the answer is no, but this is highly and likely.

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Grade Inflation

The UK A-levels examination results were released today; the best results in 60 years. 97.5 percent passed the examination while 26.7 percent were awarded an A grade.

For many candidates, indeed, it is a day of joy for the hard work they have put in to achieve this result. However, as a consequence of this grade inflation, many of them will eventually realise that the admission for university will be much more difficult. As a matter of fact, element of luck will play a greater role than their results, as university admissions will have difficulty distinguishing between the top students.

In response to the grade inflation, the Head of Exam Board has indicated that the Board is considering to include the student's percentage pass marks along with the grades, as a way to differentiate between the top students. Furthermore, there has also been suggestion to review the syllabus and make the examination more difficult.

In reflection to Malaysia, the SPM examination has also inflated greatly in terms of grading. I recalled that back in 1999 before the implementation of the "open paper", three of my schoolmates scored 10 A's with one of them scoring 10 A1's, made it to the front page of the national newspaper. Since implementing the "open paper" system in 2001, 10 A's is considered mediocre and students are striving for more than 20 A's in SPM examination.

The new Minister of Education recently announced introducing a "cap" to only 10 subjects for SPM. Indeed, a sensible initiative to reduce the inflating pressure on grade. However disappointingly, no further initiatives being considered.

In my frank view, besides limiting the number of subjects, there is also a need to:
1) review the syllabus for all the subjects;
2) consider the possibility of reducing the compulsory subjects; and more importantly
3) review the teaching and evaluation of subjects under the SPM examination.

These initiatives are much more important. Placing a "cap" will only reduce the inflationary pressure on the grades, but has no significant effect to enhance the value of examination as an evaluative tool in education.

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Youth to Youth: For A Better Malaysia

Just found out about this forum: Young? (at heart) Save Malaysia

At 330pm, there will be a panel on education/academics by Wong Chin Huat, Wan Ahmad Faysal and Nurulasyiqin Ikhwan Nasir.

Please visit the website for more info.

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Agong Scholarship

The Yang Di-Pertuan Agong Scholarship 2009. For more information, visit Public Service Comission website. Closing date: 24 August 2009.

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