Malaysia tertiary education - A systemic failure

May 21st, 2008 at 2:43 · Filed Under Blogging, Critiques, Education, Social · Comment 

One common thing I found especially in Computer Science (and engineering faculty where programming is taught) in all my visits to most Malaysian universities, none of their programming courses is ever impressive to me. The state universities are slightly better than private universities. Yet, still many of them do not teach proper programming concepts. Most of the programming courses teach C or Java as an introductory to programming. The worst thing is that these lecturers have not even mastered the language themselves.

One common thread is that, students are often given an assignment to use other programming languages like Visual Basic which they have not been taught any lesson. Students have to pick up the language themselves.

As the result, many local university graduates do not have proper training in programming and the worst, lack of systematic discipline and systematic reasoning skills. I have personally experienced this with interns and projects seeded to universities.

Some of these graduates will continue doing their master degree in the comfort of the university environment, simply they cannot find a job, they become assistant lecturers. This begins the vicious cycle. A student without proper training in programming gets into the teaching system and begins to teach improper method to younger students!

This is a systemic failure in our local education system. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I once knew a student from TARC (Tar College). She was doing accounting after her STPM. She was suffering because she could not catch up with the course work due to bad command of English. After some lengthy discussions, she finally decided to quit. Good for her. But, do you know what? She applied and was admitted into teacher training program. By now, I guess, she is teaching in the primary or secondary school. There goes another vicious cycle. A sub-standard teaching the younger generation to be sub-standards!

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