PSD scholarships – to scrap or not to scrap
“The problem now is, we have too many top scorers for only 1,500 scholarships on offer. We should use pre-university qualifications as the benchmark as it is of a higher threshold and students would have then gained admission into top-class universities.”
By Ken Vin Lek, Free Malaysia Today
Every year around the months of May and June, hundreds of “straight A” SPM students receive the news of not being offered the “illustrious” Public Service Department (PSD) scholarship.
Thousands of complaints are made by various parties, the issue becomes politicised and many people start crying out about the injustice and inequality existing in the system of allocating scholarships.
Recently, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak announced that PSD scholarships would be phased out over time, and he was promptly supported by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Nazri Aziz, who said that the move is an effort to “reduce brain drain” and that the government “lacked capacity” to fund students.
FMT has made an indepth study into the arguments surrounding the PSD scholarship issue, and we leave it to the public to make up their mind on what’s right and what’s wrong.
Allocating scholarships based on SPM results
Many parties have questioned the suitability of using the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) as a benchmark for PSD scholarships.
PJ Utara MP, Tony Pua, questioned the process of awarding scholarship at SPM level and instead suggested that students be picked based on their pre-university qualifications.
“The problem now is, we have too many top scorers for only 1,500 scholarships on offer. We should use pre-university qualifications as the benchmark as it is of a higher threshold and students would have then gained admission into top-class universities.”
“What we are doing now is, we are pre-determining whether one is suitable for courses like Medicine and Law based on the SPM results without the students receiving any offers from universities to pursue these subjects,” he added.
Pua also criticised Nazri for linking the phasing-out of scholarships to an effort to reduce the brain drain.
“It is nonsense to say that phasing out scholarships can actually reduce the brain drain. We all know foreign institutions are capable of developing talented leaders in their various fields,” he said.
Meanwhile, some also question the quality of obtaining an A+ in SPM level subjects.
An admininistration manager from a private company in charge of recruiting employees said: “Some of these students with an A1 (A+) in English cannot even converse fluently in English. The grade simply cannot be trusted.”
A number of teachers interviewed said that for some subjects like Physics, students had to score only 60% to obtain an A+ in SPM.
“There is a graph which shifts every year so that there is a ‘consistent’ trend of straight As students year after year,” a SPM examiner who refused to be named said.
To make matters worse, there have been medical student hopefuls who obtained the PSD scholarship and yet failed to make the grades at A levels to qualify for medical school in the UK.
These students obtained woeful results at A levels, failing to obtain the 3As necessary to qualify for medical school.
