Quality of Postgraduates

Kian Ming wrote on the additional grants to our four of our leading universities to promote research, development and postgraduate studies as well as the implications of more postgraduates at Universiti Malaya (UM). It has obviously stirred some interest (I can only say that many of you are actually related to the academia in one way or another), so I thought I'll add my two sen here, particularly with regards to some comments made on the post.

I'd just like to comment on the quality of the postgraduate students who has made applications to positions within my company. My recruitment advertisements are usually for fresh graduates, but I do receive the occasional postgraduates applying for the positions. They do not however, receive any preferential treatment over the typical fresh graduates. Before I proceed with my two sen, I do want to emphasize that my experience is pretty much anecdotal and I've not done a thorough study which will prove or "rubbish" the findings :)

I find the quality of the local postgraduate programmes extremely unreliable. I'm not familiar with the local postgraduate quality control and entry requirements, but the impression I get is that they are either absent or very low. When I review the results obtained by the postgraduates, there usually is a huge disparity between the results obtained from the Masters and their undergraduate studies.

As an example, I will get a candidate who received a CGPA of 2.6 for their undergraduate studies, receiving a score of 3.7 a year later for their Masters. And I get these cases pretty often. I find the disparity in results just unbelievable. It almost appears as if, the Masters programmes are tailored specifically for students who did poorly for the undergraduate programmes to achieve a better score for themselves!

Hence my concern with the idea that the local research universities seek to substantially increase their future postgraduate intakes. I'm not familiar with the entry mechanisms and criteria for postgraduate studies, but I certainly think that they need to be set much higher than it is at the moment. Maybe Kian Ming can share his application process to Duke, and that can be compared against the typical application process to a local institution.

Certainly it will be a self-defeating policy of increasing research and development funds but then throwing them to a larger number of unqualified candidates. And these are the very candidates who may decide to remain in the academia to teach and pursue their PhDs.