faulker059

Read this from the Duke alumnus magazine. I think it's a good reminder for our VCs - don't try to 'game' the ranking system, concentrate on improving your university in ways you see fit. Under the GargoyleThe Rankings Game: Who's Playing Whom? By John F. Burness U.S. News & World Report published its first annual ranking of the nation's best colleges in 1983. In the years since, the publication has spawned a cottage industry, transformed how the public thinks about higher education, and in the process made a lot of money. Over the past three decades, I've had ample opportunity to dissect the various rankings or discuss the validity of their methodologies in an effort to explain to a wide range of university constituencies, including the news media, why the universities where I worked—the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell, and for the last seventeen years, Duke—were rated where they were. It's fun as I retire from university admini...

A few conversations I've had and events I've attended over the past week led me to this blog post. It's a post that is primarily about thinking of new ways to solve old and new problems in the education realm in Malaysia. The first conversation I had was with a friend and we were talking about smart people whom we both knew. I came to the conclusion that many of us make the unconscious link between being smart with having a high IQ or being book smart. This is not really surprising given that our whole education system is geared towards rewarding people who are book smart. But the older I get, the more I realize that emphasizing being book smart above other kinds of 'intelligence' is not a very smart thing to do, whether one is an educationist, a corporate leader, a politician or a parent. In any project / organization that one is involved in, I think it's necessary to have people with different kinds of 'intelligence' to achieve good outcomes. This kind...

Read this bit of sad news. Got the link from a friend. A* scholar kills himself over a relationship gone bad. No angle on this. Just sad that someone so young would kill himself over a relationship.

A major problem with our school system has to be the way we teach history. Our textbooks are profoundly boring, and our syllabus wholly propagandistic. Because both these attributes of Malaysian history as taught in our public schools are so blatant and obvious, it is hard to respect or pay attention to our history - something which I think is a very serious problem with our education system. I am presently working on a research proposal about our colonial history for my university's history department, and in the process I've been reading up a lot on Malaysian history. I've really been struck by how interesting and fascinating our history actually is, compared to the dull portraits of our past which we were all served back in school. After looking over some university-level textbooks about Malaysian history, I have reached the conclusion that there are two problems with the way we teach history. The first problem is that we push a particular political and ideological angle...

Read this in the Star today. The Selangor state government is giving out 10 scholarships to Malays and Indians who are fluent in Chinese to pursue degrees in China. The cost of the scholarship is about RM100,000 per person. Didn't say for how long but I presume that it's for 3 or 4 years. I was ambivalent about this move initially but I think as long as the state government BONDS these students to come back to work for the state government, it is a worthwhile policy to pursue. The state government, with far more limited resources compared to the federal government cannot afford to let these students off 'for free', like the JPA scholars who are sponsored by the federal government.

The Malaysian Insider, which I write a weekly column for, has just published an op-ed by former Leader of the Opposition Lim Kit Siang , blasting Education Minister Hishammuddin Hussein for Malaysia's atrocious performance in the 2007 edition of the quadrennial Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This is the first I'd heard of this, and Lim is quite right that the mainstream media and the government have been conspicuously silent about our poor showing, despite their trumpeting of our success in the 2003 TIMSS. We have fallen ten spots in the maths rankings, from #10 to #20, and fallen one spot in the science rankings, from #20 to #21. The most worrying thing about this is that when you look at our performance in absolute terms, we're falling ever further behind. We've gone from 519 points for 8th grade maths in 1999 to 474 in 2007; for science, from 492 in 1999 to 471 in 2007. The average score is supposed to be 500, so we have been consist...

This is pretty significant news for Higher Education in Malaysia. USM will soon introduce its own entrance exams. I'll post the full article below (for posterity) and then comment on the other side. PENANG: USM will begin direct open intake beginning May this year instead of going through the UPU (Unit Pusat Universiti). USM vice chancellor Tan Sri Professor Dato' Dr Dzulkifli Abdul Razak said the measure would be implemented beginning the new intake for this year and next year. Students can apply through the university's website at www.usm.my. He said so far 13,000 applications had been received while the university would take in only about 3,500 students. Dzulkifli pointed out that USM would select only students that meet the requirements, one of which would be the "admission tests." The direct intake policy will be a departure from the conventional UPU allocation system, and this should bring about far-fetching effects on tertiary institutions in this country....

Lest I be accused of always bashing UM, here's a bit of good news concerning the oldest university in our young country. "Singapore’s youngest private university, SIM University (UniSIM), is cooperating with Universiti Malaya (UM) to expand the use of Bahasa Malaysia at the international level through sharing of expertise, syllabus and training. UniSIM president Prof Cheong Hee Kiat said the two institutions hoped to realise the objective through such cooperation forged for UniSIM’s Bachelor in Malay Language and Literature programme." Good to see UM's comparative advantage put to good use abroad. Perhaps this can be replicated in other places e.g. Thailand or China?

This looks like a bad joke at first. "Insufficient classrooms has left 553 Form One students here in a limbo." Apparently due to bad planning. So these 553 Form One students don't have a school to go to. Maybe they should head to the nearest cybercafe instead. Sabah really gets the short end of the stick. I remember reading somewhere that a school near KK had a 100% failure rate for the UPSR or PMR exams. Now kids in Sabah don't have classrooms to go to!

Apparently, the MB of Perlis sends his children to a Chinese primary school. This is the 4th child in his family to attend a Chinese primary school. Does he know something which others don't know or maybe don't want to admit that they know? You guys be the judge.

I've found that one of the most controversial debates when it comes to education, especially in developed countries, is what is the best way to spend the scarce money we have on education. The debate often boils down to a choice between two things: smaller classes, or better teachers. Personally, I've always felt it's obvious that we should pay teachers better, especially in Malaysia. There is no reason to hold teachers to a rigid pay scale based on seniority, let alone the pay scale of the civil service. Teachers perform a much more important job than civil servants, and I daresay deal with a lot more stress. It only makes sense to pay them more, and especially to pay the outstanding teachers more. The argument for smaller class sizes seems rather vague to me, and it's predicated essentially on the notion that it's hard for good teachers to pay attention to more than 20 pupils at a time. While I think there is probably room to rethink the traditional classroom dyna...

UT Dallas is not a household name in Malaysia. Indeed, it's not even a household name in the United States. Most people would associate UT (University of Texas) with its flagship campus in Austin, Texas. (One of my favorite cities in the US, I may add) I recently met an Indian student from UT Dallas who enlightened me about how important a research university UT Dallas actually is. I think UT Dallas holds interesting lessons for our own public universities in Malaysia. According to Wikipedia , UT Dallas is actually the largest research university within the UT system, even larger than UT at Austin. But it's not that surprising given that UT Dallas started out as a research arm of Texas Instruments (TI), probably one of the most innovative large corporations in the US. UT Dallas started giving out graduate degrees before conferring undergrad degrees which might explain why the academic standards there are relatively high, especially for a state school that is not named Michiga...

A little departure from the regular post. It is inspired by a trip I recently took to the bookstore with 4 refugee kids who recently migrated to the US from a Southeast Asian country (Not Malaysia!) because their tribe was being persecuted by the central government in their country. My wife and I were giving some of them Math tuition for about a year before we had to stop because of my thesis commitments. We bought each of the eight kids in the family a Barnes and Nobles gift card and I brought 4 of them (space constraints in the car) to a Barnes bookstore on Monday so that they could use their giftcards to buy some books. It was a learning experience, for them as well as for me. The oldest kid in the car was a boy, 15. The girls were aged 8, 10 and 13. I thought I could just leave them to roam about the bookstore by themselves to pick and choose the books which they would like to purchase. But I thought wrong. When I was young, my parents used to dump me in a bookstore and let me wand...