Eat the pudding to test it

I refer to your article “Curtailing short cuts to degrees” dated 23 March 2003. Allow me to quote Stamford College’s U.K.Menon “……………...Rather than looking at the years, look at the curriculum instead.” Let me offer you an analogy. If you have to cook a large pot of dhall curry but are only given half the amount of required ingredients won’t the curry end up very watery? No matter how impressive the curriculum looks, when time does not permit, how much can you teach? Without the basics, students won’t be able to go for more. Given today’s scenario, many students just depend on their lecturers.

I am sure all Malaysians are aware the curriculum does not say anything much about a course. The real test is to eat the pudding. The curriculum can look very enticing but the real course content can be very shallow and limited. If you sit through one such course you might find that at the end of it all you hadn’t really learnt anything solid. I believe we shouldn’t trust any curriculum but that the real test is to attend the lectures. I wonder if colleges allow potential students or their parents to sit in at their lectures in order to evaluate the course content.

A curriculum can be very beautifully packaged to look good. Today’s world is very shallow and people just look at the aesthetic aspect and if that looks good they agree that something is good. But is it really good? Today, people aren’t very honest because profits are uppermost in their minds. Moral responsibility and a sense of fairness are secondary. I’d recommend that people should not just trust the packaging but open up the box to check its contents. Private colleges are not unlike salesmen. They will never tell you the whole truth so we must remember the adage “Buyer Beware”. We must remember that they all exist to make money. Making money is fine as long as people get their money’s worth.

These days there are lots of MBA, law, business etc etc graduates who drive their employers up the wall with their slip-shod working ethics. These so-called graduates truly believe that they had indeed been very well-trained by their colleges. I do not dispute the fact that these colleges have trained their graduates very well in the “copy and paste” technique.

You get so-called lawyers who happily sign documents which are full of serious factual and language mistakes. Weren’t they trained to check their work? Executives proudly send out letters which are full of rubbishy sentences. These letters are made up of bombastic words and phrases which are stringed together into so-called sentences that can make one blush.

One day the fast-track engineering graduates will be building bridges, high-rise buildings etc. Wither is our nation heading? Let’s just hope they won’t start producing doctors ala fast-track!

Note : This was not published in the "let's Hear It" page of Star Education, The Sunday Star probably because The Star can't afford to offend the private colleges LOL.