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....