Medal Obsession Continues...

Ok, I've had it. I've criticised (see here and here) frequently, Malaysia universities' narcissistic obsession with collecting coloured medals at trade fairs and exhibition all around the world.

However, the ease at which these medals can be purchased and paraded as academic achievements to the clueless government and the general public who knows no better, is obviously just too irresistable for university officials.

The latest in the list of universities parading their self-gratifying achievements are Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in the Star here, and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) in the New Straits Times, here.

A team of nine researchers from Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) carved a name for Malaysia when they brought home five gold and five silver medals from the World Exhibition of Innovation, Research and New Technologies Brussels Innova & Eureka in Belgium last month. The team submitted 10 inventions for the competition held between Nov 23 and 27.

More than 300 inventions were displayed, with participants coming from the United States, Taiwan, Romania, Belgium and Croatia.

The proud and ecstatic vice-chancellor was proudly showing off the team from UiTM for having achieved "perfect" returns, 10 submission returning with 10 medals.

...Datuk Seri Prof Ibrahim Abu Shah told a press conference yesterday that the success proved the capabilities of researchers from the university to compete at the international-level.

Now, let me bring the Professor there back down to earth before Tok Pa or Pak Lah himself starts lavishing praise on these so-called achievements.

Firstly, and as asserted in my previous commentaries on dog and pony show events, these trade fairs and exhibitions which our Malaysian universities love participating are not, as described "competitions", much less "academic competitions".

They are, and I emphasise, for-profit events for the organisers which our universities have paid a lot of money to participate, and in turn receive "tokens" of appreciation from the grateful organisations in the form of well, what better than medals?

Need evidence?

Have a look for yourself the Brussels Eureka web page which listed the number of medals awarded. Count for yourself the number of medals awarded.

Yes, that's a total 303 gold, silver and bronze medal winners, out of a total of 314 participants i.e., a 96.5% success rate. The non-medal winners (11 of them), received a "Diploma" which comes automatically with the purchase of an exhibition booth. There are no losers. Out of the number of participants, a whopping 167 or 53.2% of participants went home with "Gold-coloured" medals.

You'd also be interested to know that these colourful medal awards are not judged by distinguished academic peers but by the organisers themselves, who in all likelihood, have little knowledge or interest with regards to the inventions' reliability, application, efficiency, safety, commercial viability or for that matter, honesty!

Now, if UiTM and other local universities attempt to boast of its impressive achievements at "international levels" based on medal collections from such trade shows, I think it's just absolutely disgraceful and its really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

You'd be interested to know, the Malaysian "academic" contingent comprising of 26 submissions would have forked out anywhere between RM300,000 to RM500,000, depending on various factors such as the size of the floor space and utilisation of supplementary services such as furniture, electricity, telephone etc., just as basic participation fees of the event. Basic accomodation and economy flights alone will easily add an additional RM200,000 or more to the cost of sending our exhibitors. This has yet to take into consideration the "cost" of preparing the relevant prototypes for the "inventions".

Essentially, each year, by taking part in some 4 to 5 such trade shows, the Malaysian public universities are spending millions in public funds, yes, our tax payers' money, on trade fair junketts to London, Brussels, Geneva, Nuremberg and other exotic destinations to collect academically worthless medals.

When instead, the precious funds which our universities are already short of, should have been spent on attaining achievements which really matter, like getting worthwhile research published in internationally renown journals.

I'm tearing my hair out on this issue, but I'm not finished yet, more on our obsession with fancy medals tomorrow's Part II.

Medal Obsession Continues... (Part II)

I've written in the first part of "Medal Obsession Continues..." on how our universities were gloating about their achievements to the press. And how, with a little common sense and research, it is obvious for all the (lack of) value of the multi-coloured medals collected by our academics.

Many readers have also commented on the post that I should submit the article to the mainstream and online press... Should I? I doubt that the mainstream media will print the letter though, given its fairly "tough" language. If however, any journalist who are reading this, who'd like to do an article on it, I'm more than happy to be quoted or for the article to be used. Or you can contact me for further clarifications. ;)

Now, back to the second part of my "Medal Obsession" thesis ;). Again using the example of the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM)'s participation at the World Exhibition of Innovation, Research and New Technologies Brussels Innova & Eureka in Belgium.

While I have discredited the value of the medals and awards achieved by the Malaysian contingent in Brussels, I'd like to also emphasize the fact that I am not suggesting that universities should not be taking part in trade fairs and exhibitions altogether.

Let's have a look at the Brussels-Eureka event and its target visitors.

Brussels-Eureka is looking to attract manufacturers, distributors, investors and sales professionals from Belgium and several foreign countries, wanting to establish specific commercial and industrial relationships.

The organisers hence seek to attract exhibitors

• To make your inventions, original prototypes or new technology known.
• To establish the necessary contacts to commercialize your patent.
• To realize your commercial or industrial relations.
• To meet manufacturers, financiers and/or traders from various countries.

The event was clearly not a "competition" for judging "inventions" for the award of ego-boosting medals.

However, by looking at the objectives of the event and the types of exhibitors it sought to attract, there may be useful reasons why university researchers could take part in the event. If, for example, the UiTM academics are truly interested to meet financiers or manufacturers to market their products, then such events could possibly be the platform for their commercialisation.

The problem is, it is clear from the total emphasis given to the medal tally by all participating local universities in the past 3 years, and none on the commercialisation aspects, the universities aren't particularly interested in the latter objective of the exercise.

The Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) must insist on establishing certain parameters and ground rules for participation of local universities in such events. These ground rules are to ensure that taking part in trade fairs overseas do not become junkett trips for academics to have a jolly time at exotic destinations in Europe. Or equivalent to our local councils toilet inspection trips to Maldives.

First to be established must be key performance indicators (KPIs) to judge the usefulness of the academics participation in the events. MoHE must seek replies from the universities on some of the following questions:

• For the past 3 years, with millions spent on taking part in these trade fairs, how much tangible (medals not included) returns are there.
  
  
• How many contracts have been signed between our universities with international manufacturers or venture capitalists to explore the potential of the "award-winning" inventions?
  
  
• Have there even been any serious discussions with international manufacturers or venture capitalists to develop the products or inventions exhibited by our university academics?
  
  
• Or for that matter, have there even been any interest at all, by these foreign parties in our so-called inventions at these trade fairs? After spending millions, how many of the international venture capitalists or businessmen have our academics even had a conversation with?

Surely, if even a single multi-million contract have been signed by the universities, that will be a better achievement to gloat about than bringing home dozens of coloured medals.

No, our local universities chose to prove their worth by simply taking the easier route, by spending precious funds in dog and pony shows to collect medals of little or no value. And given that the gullible government administration and the uninformed public, the universities have the opportunity to showcase themselves as multiple international award-winning "academics".

THES 2007 Rankings: Denial Syndrome Persists

There is plenty to blog about with regards to the latest Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University Rankings table which was released and blogged here yesterday. I've managed to obtain the full report earlier.

All of our universities which are "ranked" have fallen in positions. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) fell to 309th from 185th in 2006, Universiti Malaya (UM) to 246th (192) and Universiti Sains Malaysia to 307th (277)

One point however, sticks out. In a press conference yesterday held by some of the local vice-chancellors, the denial syndrome, a disease which has enveloped our academia has clearly not been cured since the days of Kapten Datuk Professor Dr Hashim Yaakob.

The vice-chancellors, including Datuk Rafiah Salim, of UM, gave several excuses for the dismal performance by Malaysian universities.

Firstly, they blamed the "change" in methodology for the drastic fall in rankings. It sounded as if the methodology was specifically tweaked to disadvantage Malaysian universities when in fact, it was tweaked to ensure greater transparency and accuracy.

As highlighted in the main THES rankings report:

In addition, we have strengthened our safeguards against individuals voting for their own university in the peer review part of the analysis." This improvement in methodology is certainly fair as it prevents the bias to vote for one's own institution.

And the result of the above change in methodology, as specifically highlighted in the full THES report, was the corresponding decline in Malaysian universities rankings!

But we suspect that some Malaysian and Singaporean institutions have lost out because of our increased rigour over voting for one’s own university, and there are no Malaysian universities in this top 200.

This clearly indicates that Malaysian universities were ranked better in previous years in part due to Malaysian academicians ranking their own universities highly when completing the survey! That's academic honesty for you, a la Malaysia.

Secondly, what was disgraceful, was Datuk Rafiah's attempts to de-sensitise Malaysia's dismal performance by arguing that Singapore suffered the same fate as well:

"Even the National University of Singapore (NUS) has dropped to the 33rd spot when it was always within the top 10."

Here, she is wrong on 2 counts. Firstly, NUS was and has never been a Top 10 ranked university. Last year, it was ranked 19th, falling 14 places to 33rd currently. It was ranked 22nd in 2005. Hence Datuk Rafiah Salim is guilty of citing wrong figures to prove her point, with the unintended consequence of epitomising the general quality of local research.

On the second count, NUS remains well within the Top 50 of the world and has not fluctuated more than 14 places over the past 4 years while UM tanked year after year! I don't know how Datuk Rafiah equated UM's plight to NUS's.

Then Datuk Rafiah complained that "The way [she] look at it, smaller countries like Malaysia are bound to lose out as THES has introduced new criteria which is peer review and has changed the citation and list of publications."

Again, it's a case of self-pity which will not take Malaysian academic standards anywhere. Singapore is some 480 times smaller than Malaysia in terms of land area and 6 times smaller in terms of population. That didn't seem to stop them from having 2 universities ranked within the Top 100. Other developing countries such as South Africa, Mexico, Taiwan and Brazil also has universities ranked within the Top 200.

Finally, she asked for more money.

If we want to compete with some of the top universities in the world, first we have to be in the same league. Right now, we are not. One way to overcome that is through adequate funding.

No, Datuk Rafiah, the first thing to do isn't asking for new funding. Giving lots of money to half-baked researchers and academics isn't going to improve the quality of the universities by very much. It's not too dissimilar to the Government's effort of launching our so-called "space programme" by paying the taxi fare for a Malaysian to go to space. Or for that matter, more money could just mean more funds for the academically meaningless pursuit of worthless coloured medals.

The first things to do, has to be the following (in simple terms, as elaborated in other blog posts):

1. Recruit the best lecturers and academicians from Malaysia and all over the world, instead of focusing on race, nationality and patronage.
   
   
2. Enrol the best students qualified for each faculty, instead of the current ambiguous and seemingly random university and course allocation.
   
   
3. Practice transparency in all aspects of the academia, from recruitment to promotions of academics, as well as setting clearly defined minimum entry requirements into every course and publishing such data post every enrolment cycle.

The above are well within the rights and functions of both the Ministry of Higher Education and the university administrators. The question is, whether the authorities are willing to face up to the challenges and weakness of our current system, and take the hard but absolutely necessary actions to raise the bar.

Without the required political will, Malaysian universities will be doomed to further demise particularly if we are preoccupied with treating the superficial symtoms such as recruiting more foreign students from 3rd world countries, instead of tackling the core issues.

I was happy to provide Datuk Rafiah Salim the benefit of the doubt when she was first appointed as UM's vice-chancellor as blogged here. However, her recent statements, her immature treatment of Dr Azmi Sharom plus her outburst at the recently concluded student leaders' meet certainly lowered my confidence in her ability to turn things around. For someone who claimed that raising UM's ranking on THES is one of her 3 core tasks, she definitely appears to be failing her own benchmarks, and failing badly at that.

Footnote: Let me emphasize that it gives me no pleasure to find Malaysian universities dropping out of the Top 200 list. I certainly wish that we have representation among the Top 50 universities, and that'll be something I'll be extremely proud of. But the state of affairs of our higher education requires a "extreme makeover", and demands the harshest of constructive criticisms. Molly-coddling the issues as our government has done over the past decades will not miraculously result in our problems fade away.

More on Malaysian Higher Education

The standards of our universities are of greatest concern to all Malaysians who care for the country. And certainly, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, arguably the most respected amongst the UMNO Ministers and MPs, despair at the state of "continued decline of Malaysian universities in the world rankings" as per his recent published letter in Malaysiakini.com.

He's probably even less optimistic about its future than I am, if I were to take his comments at face value:

Even Indonesian and Thai universities appear to have faired much better than the universities here in Malaysia, once the pride of this region. By this time next year, we may have to resign ourselves to having all these universities out of the first 500.

He blames the current predicament on several factors.

1. The English Medium

Thirty years of trying to re-engineer the educational medium of instruction has brought us to this. Almost every major textbook, citation and publication is in English.

The minister must be pragmatic and muster the administrative and political will to enforce the usage of English if we are not to be left behind by countries like Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. Even newsreaders from China today appear to be able to present news better than our local newsreaders.

2. Student quality

The minister may be stuck with the quota system for his own political survival, but surely he can help improve standards here by trying to keep at least good bumiputera students at our universities. Currently, the good ones are shipped off to very expensive overseas universities and the less capable ones are placed in local universities. Common sense indicates that this is a recipe for disaster in terms of trying to maintain or improve the standards of our local universities.

3. Appointment of lecturers

For far too long, the minister has been giving independence to our local universities to choose their lecturers. This policy must change. The dismal standards may require the ministry to step in directly to ensure that good lecturers are appointed.

4. Publications

The ministry must set up its own audit team to ensure continuous publications. Without this most important criteria, Malaysian universities cannot hope to climb the ladder again and may be stuck in the doldrums for years to come.

The publication culture even in an established university like Universiti Malaya is surprisingly absent. Publications are what make a university and this is seriously lacking in our universities. The minister must again ensure that those lecturers who publish are rewarded and not cold-storaged for being “too clever”.

Of the four points, I'm in total agreement with point (4) on publications. A university that doesn't publish, or one that only writes to lifestyle magazines, make sensationalist claims to local newspapers without peer review or prefers to take part in dog and pony shows in Europe to collect coloured medals doesn't deserve recognition, and is certainly not worth its salt. Without the necessary academic rigour, we become just a degree manufacturing facility without intellectual depth.

I'm in semi-agreement with points (1) and (3). I believe English is of prime importance but I'm not sure if it'll change the standards to drastically at our universities. The university academics will probably argue that because it's not their mother tongue, the standards will drop further after the switch to an English discourse. All hell will of course, break loose at the UMNO General Assembly. While I certainly hope that the standards of English will improve tremendously in the near term, I actually think that there are several other key policies which the Government can undertake to arrest the decline in standards.

With regards to point (3) where it was suggested that lecturers be appointed centrally by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) - I would agree with the diagnosis that the culture of recruitment of quality lecturers at our local universities are abhorrent, but placing the recruitment process in the hands of the clueless civil servants at the MOHE, will certainly not change things too much.

I would start where I have always proposed vigourously - that is to open the selection and applications of Vice-Chancellors and senior academics to local universities. Have the resumes vetted by an independent senior panel, not inclined to sway to political pressures. Of course, once the "best" is selected, give them the necessary hand to overhaul the university administration to improve standards.

Finally, I'm disagreeable to the suggestion that scholars should not be sent overseas but instead retained in the local universities. I certainly believe that deserving students must be given scholarships to pursue their further education at the top universities overseas. However, the practice of sending mediocre students to 3rd rate universities overseas must be stopped for it's just a waste of the county's precious resources.

I am of the opinion that the standards of the local universities will improve significantly should there be the practice of enrolling the best students for each faculty and university, even without taking into consideration the "better" students who have been given scholarships to go overseas. Currently, it isn't transparent how students are allocated to the respective subjects and universities. There appears to be an unhealthy hidden hand behind the scenes in the above process.

Enrolling the best students for each university and course would also mean that the Government must scrap the unequal entry requirements for Malaysian students i.e., via the matriculation or the STPM system. Hence, the standards at our local universities can easily improve even if the Government continues to send students overseas. They just need to make sure that the remaining cohort of students are given an equal footing to compete for excellence. ;-)

Budget 2007 (III): Quantity vs Quality

This is the third instalment of my analysis of the Budget recently announced by the Prime Minister recently. The first covered the outline of the Budget relating to the education sector, whilst the second was an assessment of the impact of the allocation on the respective ethnic groups in the country. This third of five instalments will cover Malaysia's persistent emphasis on quantity at the expense of quality in the education sector.

It has been announced in the Prime Minister's budget speech that The Government will establish Universiti Darul Iman Malaysia in Terengganu and Universiti Darul Naim in Kelantan, as well as upgrade Akademi Tentera Malaysia (Military Academy of Malaysia) into Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia (National Defence University of Malaysia).

Very simply, that brings the total number of public universities and university colleges to 19. As it stands, we also have a total of 22 private universities and university colleges to date. This number hasn't yet included the new colleges which will be granted university college status this year. This means that the nation has at least 41 university and university colleges not including tens of institutions offering degree programmes in partnership with foreign universities serving a population of 26.4 million. That works out to a ratio of approximately 644,000 to each university.

On the other hand, our neighbour with significantly higher standards in education measured by all indicators except for that produced by the Selangor Menteri Besar, possesses only 3 universities in total serving the population of 4 million. This works out to a ratio of 1.33 million per university.

As earlier highlighted in this blog, that essentially means that we have more than double the number of universities relative to Singapore.

With only 3 universities, Singapore has 2 universities in the Top 50 and Top 200 of the THES and Shanghai Jiaotung University global rankings table respectively. Singapore Management University (SMU), being relatively new, is understandably omitted from the rankings. On the other hand, Malaysia which has more than 40 universities, has none in the top 150 and the top 500 of the respective rankings table (See post on "Latest Global University Rankings").

If this does not represent a clear emphasis for quantity over quality, I'm not sure what other evidence can be used to demonstrate otherwise.

In addition, it is of greater importance for countries like Malaysia to utilise its limited resources to fully exploit the potentials of its younger generation in order to significantly raise productivity and innovation in the future. As it stands because of the number of institutions the Government will have to support, the already precious and limited funds are distributed across way too many institutions.

Although the Singapore education budget is in absolute terms, smaller than that in Malaysia – S$6.16 billion (RM14.2b), it spends S$1.24 billion (RM2.86b) on its 3 universities. National University of Singapore (NUS) itself receives some S$700.7 million (RM1.65b) from the Government. Comparatively, Malaysia's premier university, Universiti Malaya (UM) receives support of only [RM will provide exact figure later] million from the Malaysian Government. It is not surprising then that NUS can pride itself to be a true world-class university, attracting the top students and academics of the world and produces some of the globally recognised top class analysis and research globally. UM on the other hand, had to rely on paying to take part in dog and pony trade shows to collect meaningless coloured medals.

The fact that the government has only allocated RM195 million to “upgrade and improve the facilities” of the existing 16 or so universities and university colleges, averaging only RM12.2 million per institution, indicates how our funds our being stretched unnecessarily by the quantity of institutions.

As a result, the only possible outcome from the policy which emphasized on quantity at the expense of quality, is the production of many (note: not all) local graduates who are not sufficiently equipped with communication, critical thinking and analytical skills. It is hence unsurprising that the Government has to make itself the dump for the unemployable graduates.

While admittedly, the quantity policy is one which is difficult to reverse, it is important for the Government to demonstrate its political will to reverse the trend, even if its baby steps, to show that it is recognising that its policy has resulted in creating degree factories producing many substandard products.