From SPM straight to varsity degree: a proposal

Previously, I wrote about standardised testing which, in my opinion, is getting more and more outdated and irrelevant. In the process of reforms, I mentioned about the gap year between SPM and enrolment to university. For a long time, I have been perplexed by the existence of the gap year. It causes a ton of unnecessary troubles, confusions, and expenses.

In the United States, students are able to apply to enter universities after their high school. I think this is a straightforward path which seems to be more convenient and logical than the one currently practiced in Malaysia. Here’s why.

After SPM, Malaysian students have to pick one out of a variety of paths to enter the universities for a degree. We have STPM (Form 6), A-levels, local matriculation, diploma courses, Australian matriculation, Canadian pre-university, American degree transfer program, international baccalaureate (IB), and a host of other foundation or professional courses. Depending on which path you take, you could be looking at a 10-month course or a two-year program. In term of expenses, you could either be spending nothing or tens of thousands of ringgit.

By common consensus, STPM and IB are two of the toughest programs. Thus, even though STPM is virtually free education, there is a trade off in the sense that the student will be taking a harder test than his or her peers in the other programs. This makes for a complaint among STPM takers during the local university admission process. Some felt that it is unfair to treat STPM students the same as the local matriculation students because STPM is harder than matriculation and thus, the weighting scale shouldn’t be the same. For example, a student with 3A and 1B in STPM might very well have scored all As in the local matriculation.

This of course presents a delicate problem for the university administrators and ministry officials. How do you compare the weightage between the different pre-university programs? Whichever way you do it, you will be criticised for being unfair to one program or the other (though this is not saying that we should treat the program’s difficulty level all the same). Perhaps a quota system would work, but it would have to be synchronised with the present quota already in practice.

Then there’s also the question of affordability. Not everyone can afford to go to private colleges and universities. And not everyone can obtain a scholarship if he or she is not able to afford those education programmes. In most cases, the poor families, low-middle class and middle class are limited to three options: STPM (which is much harder, and failing one of the four subjects would mean you have to either retake the exam or start anew), local matriculation (easier compared to STPM, but the program has limited slots), and short-term/certificate/professional courses.

But quality education shouldn’t be available only to those who can pay for it. Quality education is a basic necessity in and of itself. Our aspiration to become a high-income nation requires high-skilled workers, which are dependent on the level of education received by our workforce. We cannot let quality education becomes a private for-profit business.

One could also take up PTPTN loan to study diploma (two and a half years), but then one might have to study additional three to four years if one were to get a degree, resulting in one taking a longer path than necessary.

Looking at the mess, I wonder if it’s easier to just have one additional year of school, after which all the students can apply directly to the universities (local and overseas). This proposal will get rid of all the aforementioned problems and confusions; the multiple streams towards university enrolment; the unfair weightage; the affordability issue.

The big loser would be the private colleges and universities. Private education is a big business in Malaysia after all. While it’s true that they contribute to the economy, if one really have the long-term interest of the nation in mind, the benefits to the students and accessibility to quality education should be prioritized over the private companies’ profits.

Education reforms are lengthy and radical changes are unlikely to happen in the next few years. But if one day we were to scrap standardised tests and rethink about the education system as a whole (from kindergarten to university level), I hope this proposal to cut off the gap between secondary school and university enrolment could be taken up and considered as part of the changes. – June 13, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.