KUALA LUMPUR, June 17 — MCA president Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek has blamed Malaysia’s declining education standards for the growing number of SPM top scorers who fail to excel at tertiary level.
He said it was now “so easy” for SPM takers to get an A+ grade but pointed out that many employers were still disappointed by the overall quality of school leavers.
“Our standard of education has gone down south, not to the north,” he said in a Breakfast Grille interview aired on BFM today.
“We may produce straight-A+ students but the market survey shows they do not live up to expectations.”
Dr Chua pointed out that there was now “no way” to judge students based on their SPM results, citing the number of promising government-sponsored medical students who performed poorly during matriculation despite doing well in the national exam.
He also stressed that it was “high time” Putrajaya reexamine its manpower requirements as the current emphasis on giving Public Service Department (PSD) scholarships for medicine, pharmacy, veterinary science was outdated.
The government should instead focus on helping students pursuing more critical courses like green technology, IT management, manufacturing management and financial services, he suggested.
“Students should not choose the course they want at the university they want,” he said.
Dr Chua added that more room should be given for English and Chinese in the education system to ensure graduates are multilingual and ready to meet the demands of the market.
Despite Putrajaya handing out 500 special local scholarships last week on top of the 12,000 PSD grants it gives out annually, many top scorers are still disappointed they have not received government funding to study overseas.
MCA announced on Tuesday that it had set up an RM30 million study loan to all races as the government could not be relied on to cater to all those pursuing higher education.
Dr Chua, however, stressed that the fund was not a reaction to the PSD scholarship row that was a source of a heated public debate between Chinese-based parties and the right-wing Malay ground but the result of constant dialogue with school leavers.
The main bone of contention in the annual allocation of PSD scholarships centres around the 1,500 overseas grants, of which, only 20 per cent are decided based on merit.
Another 900 are given out based on racial quotas, with Sabah and Sarawak natives getting 75 grants each and the remaining 10 per cent to special needs students.
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