By M Kula Segaran, Ipoh Barat MP
After a few top scorers publicly complained of their failures to obtain medicine programmes, Deputy Education Minister P. Kamalanathan has two days ago explained that the government has offered places to only 418 brilliant students to take up medical studies (first degree) at public institutions of higher learning for this year’s intake.
He said the limited number of offers was meant to control the number of new medical graduates and avoid a flood of new doctors in the employment market.
“A total of 1,163 students with a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 4.00 applied to do medicine, but offers were only made to only 418 of them and the selection was also based on interview results. We made this decision following discussions with the Health Ministry and the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC),” he told reporters.
Such an explanation will not be satisfactory as he has not addressed two basic issues, the transparency of the selection criteria and the unfairness of sudden, reduced intake.
The question of top scorers not getting their preferred courses is not a new issue and there have been past allegations of lack of level playing fields for non Bumiputra students.
The government must therefore be totally transparent with intake details to convince the students that they have lost out to those who are better qualified.
While it is necessary for the government to prevent an oversupply of doctors, any sudden or drastic reduction in intake is cruel and unfair to the students who have excelled in their examinations.
Why has Kamalanathan kept silent on the overall drastic slash in this year’s university intake?
According to Sin Chew report dated August 15, a total of 68,702 students had applied for public university spots in the 2013-2014 academic year, 60.5 % of applicants were accepted.
For the 2014-2015 period, there were 74,071 applications, an increase of 30 % but only 50.5 % were accepted.
This big decrease in intake has caused many qualified students to be denied places. Is this fair and is it the right policy for Malaysia which aspires to be a developed nation by 2020?
I urge the Cabinet to immediately look into both the issues of top scorers being denied their preferred courses as well as the unfairness of sudden and drastic decrease in university intake.
Further, Kamalanathan said that the others who were not offered medical studies were offered other courses, but related to the field.
Some top students have openly claimed that they were offered nursing. Let me ask Kamalanathan to find out from the Cabinet Ministers—firstly, will they be heartbroken if their children were the top scorers who had applied for medicine but were given nursing course and secondly, will they advise their children to accept the nursing programmes offered?
I have received feedback that a science stream student from Selama with results of 3.5 CGPA was offered an art course to study HR Management. Apparently this form of mismatch is numerous. A science student being given an arts course. Many offered have declined this form of courses.
