Looks as if USM isn’t making much headway among the major league universities, if the THES ranking is anything to go by.
Not to be obsessed with those rankings, but I can’t help wondering where the big apex (more popularly known as ah pek) budget is going to and what kind of results it is yielding.
All those courses and workshops in hotels aimed at improving standards don’t seem to be filling up the academic “silos” of USM.
Perhaps USM is hoping that the “incubators” it plans to set up in its property development project in Bukit Jambul might bear some fruit. That’s where it hopes to establish a research park (“sains@usm”) and attract RM20 million in capital investments from local companies. (In 2008, USM bought a 12.4ha plot there for RM59 million from IJM Properties.)
The research park (otherwise known as a “science and arts innovation space”) reportedly will include a boutique hotel, convention and exhibition centre, performing arts centre and arts colony, retail space and apartments…
Don’t hold your breath, though. I am not quite sure how dabbling in property development is going to improve academic standards.
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If you can’t beat them, join them. Why spend hours in the library when you can be a property tout? You can spend your days looking for financial loopholes, like the recently reported case of obtaining cheaper credit card cash loans disguised as purchases.
Abba’s hit, Money, Money, Money is a hit with the tweenagers these days. Hey teacher, leave them kids alone. I want my iphone now, not sometime in the cosmic future.
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nampaknya penyokong mu yang happy happy pasai mu dapat masuk tangga top 200
tak baca surat kabar internasional. Yang terjerit jerit
pasal ranking ni apa pentingnya. especially yang keluarkan
ranking ni adalah hanya sebuah syarikat aje. Kalau esok malay
mail pulak nak buat ranking private colleges atau pprivate
university college dengan ipta pun bolih dan statusnya
hanyalah bragging rights di pub pub untuk member yang
bisa ke pub atau karaoke.
What have we learned about colleges atau universities
this week? Graduan woolwich [bunyi woolish ] politeknik
telah mendapat nobel prize fizik. Sekarang lihat pulak
di mana letaknya woolwich polyteknik. Tak mungkin anda
tak kan jumpa jugak . Sebabnya -ia telah diserap dek
Greenwich [bunyi greenish ] university. ianya pun tak ada
dalam top 200 dan mungkin top 500, 100 dsb.
Moral of the story-kelibat ranking ni tak penting ….
Yang si pak politik pula nak puaskan kehendak pembaca msm-
kalau ada chan buat mee segera -…]
Bak kata pepatah – kita mesti develop slowly byt surely -
bukan buat mee segera. Checklah/googlelah woolwich politeknik.
Pasti semua orang tahu dan graduannya bangga. Mangakuk mangkuk
yang dapat jadi vc tu -ambil-lah inspirasi /whatever big word
you can find- untuk jadikan um macam woolwich pokliteknik!!!!
And no mee segera thingy , please….. kerana ianya akan jadi
bahan lawak geng kita!!!!!!!!
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This ranking business is wasting taxpayers’ money. A lot of money given to the university is wasted on dubious research. Papers are superficial and most are shrewdly recycled. Universities should grow at it’s own pace. One scientific breakthrough is enough to make a university well-known, never mind if it is not listed top 100 or 200. Do we need to spend millions at these cost centres to keep up with the Jonesses? As it is, Malaysian academics are not prolific. A single research product is put into many papers under different titles. And they claim to have come up with many papers. This is happening right under the nose of university management. Many are just ignorant about this. Just look into the social sciences. Money is spent on useless papers on affectual research which has no added value to our economy. It’s all money washed into the drains. We can never learn from this.
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How to have good researches when even “scholars” in Oxford and Harvard have been caught for plagiarism. Alas, graduates these days do not cherish genuine or authentic research. It’s all plagiarism, cut-and-paste work and many people out there are doing brisk business writing papers and theses for graduates these days. This has become a million-dollar business. Outsourcing of academic work by graduates is a real business today. I came across in KL last summer a part-time taxi driver who graduated from an unknown college who handed me her business card. She said that she had the prowess to write papers for university students. She earns not less than RM5000 a month doing this. She claimed that most foreign students outsource their work to her. And she has s string of friends who are in this business. Most are good in English but do not possess high academic qualification. Malaysian students make over 60 percent of her “clients”. She carries a load of business cards for this purpose. A college student writing theses for PhD and Masters’ students at our local universities! Looking into the quality of theses these days impresses no one. A PhD thesis comes without a thesis evaluation written in it. Why? Most theses supervisors cannot write and they are ashamed to have their evaluation (if written in bad English, and also superfluous in content)read by others. Besides, most theses are passed without proper scrutiny for originality. Pick up a PhD or Master’s thesis in any local university and you are bound to see at least 65 percent of the content is plagiarised. Yet, they are passed as theses. For this reason, we today observe those with PhDs and Masters are not up to the mark. Education today does not promote knowledge but only provides paper qualification.We have Masters’ and PhD holders who cannot string even a single sentence in proper English, let alone come up with something original. Yet, we see their Masters or PhD theses written in English. How could this be?
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I fully agreed with what have been written by Karma – absolutely true..to add insult.., so many the so-called prof or associate prof (Prof Madya) at our local universities / IPTA were found unable to write / speak in English properly & fluently not only for lecturers in social science, education fields but also for the enginering and many other professional fields. Can you imagine how could this situation goes unchecked by the MOHE ?? They all dump…
They are infact among the biggest money wasting institutions in our country…wasting money by paying the most unproductive workers in the country !! I just dont believe when I found out that, in many IPTAs’, so many highly paid professors (VKC, B & A) without even supervising a single post graduate students (masters or PhD students) for so long !!! That also means unproductive if we compare with their peers in other part of the world. Their teaching workload also very minimum (seniority was taken into account to allocate academic work load), many of them enjoy to be administrators (where they could enjoy so many perks) rather than doing full time R & D activities. All these things go unchecked by MOHE & the authority. Much worst, in the brand new IPTAs (previously University colleges), most professors were appointed based on ‘who knows who – some of them called ‘diwahyukan’ title prof’ rather than based on their merit and scholarly contributions to their institution, professional society & nation.
How could we have such kind of Professors in this country ???
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MOHE should look into the non-functioning and non-productive professors and associate professors. If they are not productive, strip off their titles. With titles of this nature they are cheating students. Only in this country they have professors by “chair”. And many are just appointed by virtue of positions they hold. Some individuals are given prof and assoc prof titles on the platter and not based on their competence and writing. It is injustice to education to see those with these titles write basically nothing. ENGLISH? This is a foregone conclusion. Just talk or listen to our prof, assoc. prof and Dr holders. Some primary school kids can talk better English than them. WRITING? (Some of them) cannot write in English without copying others’ work. They cut and paste, plagiarise and claim the work as theirs. MOHE should look into this. It is not the title or degree that matters most in education, but the CONTENT. If this … goes on, students are wasting millions of dollars going to a university to study. Might as well do distance learning with foreign universities or if one could afford go to a good teaching university overseas to study.
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I believe Karma never study in any Malaysia public university when he did comment as such. Any rational people will not believe any/all/most of our profs are english illiterate. Is that so hard to proficient in english? I consider Karma comments are nonsense with purpose to degrade BN government.
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Dear Gerakan
I’ve no intention to degrade anybody. It’s just my sincere view.
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Dear Gerakan
I’ve many friends among politicians. They share my views but they say nothing much can be done to improve the academic standard we are facing now. At the end of the day, it’s the employers – not the universities – that will decide the quality and competence of a graduate. Going through a university education and obtaining a paper qualification is not enough and is also unreliable. Let the employers decide the quality of a graduate. I remember at one time, an oil company had to bring in engineers from India to work for them as they found the local “engineers” were not “competent enough” to do the job. The same has happened in many IT (MSC) companies. They prefer IT graduates from a foreign country to work for them. Whether we recognise or not their degrees is not important here. The fact that they are employed shows their competence in the area.
Best wishes to you. Thanks.
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I certainly hope that you guys are not
thinking that I am a professor-type simply because I write in Malay. I write
in Malay with some emphasis in English
because I think this is the first step
for all those who are not competent in
English to emulate. Over time these people would gain courage to properly
write English. I had in my primary school the benefit of two very good English teacher Ms Joyce Ponnudurai and Mrs Phang ,the headmistress who
were patient and yet fastidious on
every item of grammar. Luckily for me I could pass down what I had been taught to my children. I have always
chided the so called ‘pecinta bahasa’
by maintaining that that they are holding back progress. There cannot be
overwhelming success in education today without the mastery of English.
It is for this reason writers are encouraged to corrupt the Bahasa malaysia so that over time it it is the ‘bastardised’ Bahasa that shall prevail. Remember on this turf whatever you write is the right stuff.
her traits
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What’s the fuzz about? I am seriously thinking to teach in one of the universities in Malaysia. ..The pay is kinda low though .. 60% less than what I am earning now .. even with full professorship (bummer) … any thought on why I shouldn’t go back?
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