Lim Kit Siang:
In Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2012-2013, for the second consecutive year, not a single Malaysian university is included in its 400 Top World University rankings.An insightful comment from sheriff singh:
The THE World University Rankings 2012-2013 is a sad but salutary warning to Malaysians about the four-year failure of Najib’s transformation programmes, with Malaysia completely excluded from the Asia-Pacific phenomenon highlighted by the THE World University Rankings 2012-2013 on the “the rise of Asia-Pacific Universities”.
In fact MU and UKM are boycotting THES’ rankings as they feel the rankings are not fair. They say THES places a lot of weight on academic performance which our universities are sorely lacking scoring only 5 out of 100 points (5%).
Our local universities only score highly on the number of foreign students admitted and the number of foreign lecturers on their teaching staff and the ratio thereof and on physical facilities. This is really quite simple to manipulate isn’t it?
But these foreign students and lecturers are of the poorer quality and do not contribute to academic excellence and research hence their poor score of 5%. See QS rankings and the breakdown of their scores.
So our universities relatively high rankings (156 MU) on QS rankings is misleading about the academic standard of the universities (MU), (UKM) concerned.
At the end of the day, what matters is academic excellence. Other factors e.g. buildings, facilities, foreign students etc etc, are really secondary. If you admit garbage and process the garbage, you will end up producing garbage. And you will have no quality control and have no reputation.