Why local universities products are full of SHIT?

Memo to all students:

In order to assure the highest level of quality work and productivity from students, it will be our policy to keep all students well taught through our program of SPECIAL HIGH INTENSITY TEACHING (S.H.I.T.).

We are trying to give our students more S.H.I.T. than anyone else. If you feel that you do not receive your share of S.H.I.T. on the course, please see your lecturer. You will be immediately placed at the top of the S.H.I.T. list, and our lecturers are especially skilled at seeing that you get all the S.H.I.T. that you can handle.

Students who do not take their S.H.I.T. will be placed in DEPARTMENTAL EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION PROGRAMS (D.E.E.P. S.H.I.T.).

Those who fail to take D.E.E.P. S.H.I.T. seriously will have to go to EDUCATIONAL ATTITUDE TRAINING (E.A.T. S.H.I.T.). Since our lecturers took S.H.I.T. before they graduated, they do not have to do S.H.I.T. anymore, and are all full of S.H.I.T. already.

If you are full of S.H.I.T., you may be interested in a job teaching others. We can add your name to our BASIC UNDERSTANDING LECTURER LIST (B.U.L.L. S.H.I.T.).

For students who are intending to pursue a career in management and consulting, we will refer you to the department of MANAGERIAL OPERATIONAL RESEARCH EDUCATION (M.O.R.E. S.H.I.T.). This course emphasizes how to manage M.O.R.E. S.H.I.T.

If you have further questions, please direct them to our HEAD OF TEACHING, SPECIAL HIGH INTENSITY TEACHING (H.O.T. S.H.I.T.).

Thank you, BOSS IN GENERAL, SPECIAL HIGH INTENSITY TEACHING (B.I.G. S.H.I.T.).

Sincerely,
The Director Under the Malaysia Bureau of Super High Intensity Teaching (The D.U.M.B. S.H.I.T.)

A letter: This is how most of UUM student will write

Dear Ah Lian,

Thanks you for your letter. Wrong time no see you. How everything? For me, I am quiet find.

You say in your letter your taukeh soh want you to chain your look? Somemore you must wear kick kok soo, hope you can wok poperly.

You know, Ah Kau Kia working in a soft where company now. Last week he take I, Muthu and few of his friend to May Nonel to eat barger. After that he take we all go to kalah ok. Muthu sing and sing no stop until the sky bright.

Next week, my father mother going to sellerbread 20 years annie wear sari. My father mother going to give a fist to all the kampong people. So you must come with your hole family.

I only hope one day we no need to write and send letter to you and to me. Better I e-meow you, you e-meow me. I will ketchup with you soon. And when you got time, please few free to call me. Goo bye...

Worm regard,

Ah Beng
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Now tell me, who will want to hire people who write like THAT?!!! Not surprisingly, a lot of them are unemployed because they made a fool of themselves during job interviews. And yet the lecturers/vive-chancellors/officers from public universitites are still barking up the wrong tree, i.e. form a committee to look into the problem, come up with brilliant ideas to SOLVE the problem, cancel the whole idea when it didn't work, follow other countries' education system, etc.

Look at the quality of students nowadays. They are seriously deteriorating! No, the ministry obviously IS doing something about it and millions of ringgit has been spent to form a committee/look into problem/propose ideas/change system to follow other countries'.

In a nutshell, I only have two words to describe about the whole thing: WRONG APPROACH!

5 down, 1 more to go

Just finished my blardy 5th paper this morning which was Property and Liability Insurance II. Thanks to those who wished me luck because I really need the LUCK for this paper. FYI, I have no confidence in this paper at all.

You see, for the whole semester, we sat through sucky presentations by different groups on different chapters covering the whole syllabus for the semester. As I've said earlier, students just love to cramp everything from an American version textbook into the slides making the presentation meaningless. I don't understand the book at all, never mind them. But what they did was trying to be smart and include all the useless information i.e. US law, US exclusions in their insurance policies, US provisions in their insurance policy, limitations in the US insurance policies, etc. Hello? We are studying the Property and Liability Insurance of MALAYSIA, why the hell you went and put all those useless information? It is not like we are all going to live in US of A one day! Well, some people are just as DUNGU as you can imagine!

Anyway, back to the exam, when I went through (yeah, right!) the notes this morning at around 7am (yes, I am a procrastinator, I study last minute, really last minute - exam started at 8.30am) I could not understand a word of the things that I read. The only similarity that caught my attention in almost every type of liability insurance available is "bodily injury and property damage". And that was all I know.

I looked at the questions in amazement. I glanced over at Foo Kiat and saw him shaking his head and sighing every now and then. I knew everyone in the room must be having the same thought. We've been screwed! Six questions were asked (and I mean REALLY 6 questions only, with no sub-questions like any other structured questions might have) each carrying minimum 15 marks, the rest 15, 16, 16, 18 and 20 marks. You say, ridiculous or not? And I was crapping less than 50% of the page for that minimum 15 marks! There were seriously nothing to write about! I wonder how the hell Mr Shahrul marks our answer scripts.

*shakes head*

Nothing much could be done even though almost everyone was complaining. We've just been screwed! Big time! Ah, well, I've sat for 5 papers, that means ONE more to go before I get the hell out of here. Employee Benefit Management. I wonder what the hell is there to manage anyway since the employee and employer must contribute to EPF and also SOCSO as imposed by the government. Well, you know, education system in Malaysia really suck big time. It really screws undergrads! We have to take a course on Takaful, Reinsurance, Employee Benefit Management and the likes for one whole blardy semester when the things we need to know about that particular course are common sense/general knowledge. Some people just do not have cow sense!

Pardon my rantings. Lack of sleep due to last minute process of absorbing-as-much-information-as-you-can really got me short-tempered. Time to hit the bed now!

Presentation before getting the hell out of here

19th April 2007 - The Presentation

There was a presentation this day for Employee Benefit Management and my group was to present on Social Insurance: Malaysia vs Cyprus. I only received the slides the other group members had done the day before and I was horrified to see the rubbish and junk they had created out of it. I told them I'd like to re-do the whole thing A.S.A.P. and email it to them right after I finished. I headed to the computer lab right away and started working on the slides. It took me 2 hours to get it done. Well, some people just love to shove everything into the slides so that they could just read the text off the slides with all the pronounciation mistakes monotonously till I puke!

We volunteered to present second to see how the first group done their presentation. I think Ahmad just wanted to boost some ego and gain confidence before our turn. I admitted that our group did a pretty great job in our presentation (not trying to be lansi) because we managed to put up some a-few-seconds funny movie clips before we started. We cracked the class. That gained some credits I think. The 3 guys who presented before me weren't too bad but they say the last is always left for the best *damn kembang* When it came to my turn, I just rattled on with ease trying not to sound too English (as if) Haha! So I added some -lah initially but the -lah just didn't seem to blend, so I did not attempt to add them in anymore.

After finished bla bla bla-ing, came the Q&A session which I quite feared because I did not do my homework on the topic and my knowledge was limited to the part that I presented. I was hoping for my group members to take over the session but Mdm Arpah inisted that we answered in English when Ahmad wanted to answer in BM. He was struggling to answer the questions in English and that was when the hero, in this case, heroine, ME came to the rescue! LOL!!!

I knew nuts about what was going on or the questions asked but I didn't let that show on my face. Setting the debator mode in me, I managed to answer most of the questions, which were not in the scope of the slides (mostly asked by Ah Fat), without blinking. Luckily I knew enough crap to get me through that! Hahahaha!!! Well, I got a few thumbs up for my so-called 'brilliant' answers! *double kembang*

After we were done, we went back to our seat and were greeted by a round of applause. I was told that Mdm Arpah announced that she'd given us the highest mark of 19/20 for our presentation. HOORAYYY!!! *triple kembang* I was pretty pleased with that because I really did not expect to get such high marks for presentation, especially group presentation.

Teaching People to Be Mindless Parrots-Part II

Yes, I blogged about this before - TWICE - one before New Year, one somewhere else at The Star. Well, as predicted, majority of the population in this country does not know or just rather 'close one eye' to this issue. Comments and feed backs I got from this similar but slightly different articles are of course different depending on the location. In this Blogger, I got something that sound like "Don't be too seriouslah. Just go with the flow..." so on and so forth.

The longer version of the article could be found here

See what I got?

1st comment:

"Unfortunately theres still many people have the opinion that memorizing base examination is the only way to differentiate the good, the better and the best because they themselves were from the same system. Unless we are able to approach them the advantages using education system, things will never change. As we can see, the current system has fail to bring up success to our country because what they know is to memorize and follow the seniors way of doing the job."

-by hlchuah06, 7 Jan 2007-

2nd comment:

"Dear clarenicng, you have a valid point there.

How true it is and I remember just memorizing facts and figures back in my school days.

Let's hope someone up there (the Education Ministry) reads your letter. Maybe with enough "voices" we can change the policy of old.

Till then, good luck on your voyage to change the system...let's hope more parents see this as a better move."

-by jlsljohn, 8 Jan 2007-

3rd comment:

"I agree with your observation. But do you also realise that this is what most parents expect - ie that their child is seen as 'successful' measured by his ability to memorise.

And why? the parents themselves were brought up in this culture - our civil services today, is also a product of this culture. We are not taught to enjoy the pleasure of learning, but instead to follow! SO there is no pro active attitudes. So, let's all stop speaking but do something about it. Change do not come in a day - writing about it is the first step. The next is voicing it in public forums and STAND UP and make a difference. Let us leave this country a better place than what we see today!"

-by petluc, 9 Jan 2007-

That were some constructive feed backs I got randomly from the public. Do you noticed that they all summed up into only ONE thing?

Everybody is realising the problem and yet nothing is done about the problem therefore everybody thinks that there is no problem at all. Somehow somewhat when somebody voiced it out, everybody does the same thing, that is nodding in agreement that something has to be done about the problem AND expect somebody else doing it so that they can sit back, relax and enjoy the show when that somebody sheds all the sweat, tears and blood to fight for the rights so that everybody gets that piece of cheese cake.

*gasp*

*pant pant pant*

So what if the somebody who voiced out the problem is just a small fry like me? Would it get any attention if I actually voice out? Maybe. If I posted it in a Citizen's Blog of The Star Online, like what I did, I get all the supportive feedbacks and some 'good lucks' without them actually lending a helping hand or suggestions on what could be done about the problem.

Of typical Malaysian, that particular somebody who actually voiced out is expected to do something about it and not somebody else. Enough said.

Teaching People to Be Mindless Parrots

I'm not finished with the PMR thingy. Well, not just PMR alone. Rather education system in general.

This is what I overheard when people are discussing our education system...

Scenario 1:

Uncle A: I think the educational system is great. I enjoyed school and did well. My son is just like me. He loves it and is at the top of his class. Some university is going to be lucky to get him. His future is very bright. I don't understand why people are complaining so much. I think the education system is doing an excellent job.

Uncle B: But what about the kids who are not doing well in school? What about those who drop out? They are not smart theoretically but they are good at technical skills. They will not have your son's opportunity.

Uncle A: That's not my problem.

Scenario 2:

Uncle C: Leave the system alone. I did well and my kids are doing just fine. The teachers in our school are the best.

Scenario 3:

Auntie D: That is just the way things are. I can't help it if there are kids who are not as smart as mine. What do you expect me to do about it?

Sometimes when you heard comments like that, you felt like want to choke that person! But most of the times, as the society has been adopting the kiasi syndrome, most people will just agree, nodding and just go with the flow. No opinions are made. What is wrong here?

Everything!

Memorization and knowledge are NOT the same! People know that it is true, and that there is something important about making this distinction. They also know that our educational system puts a great deal of emphasis on rote learning aka memorization. In fact, diplomas and bachelor degrees are awarded on the basis of how good we are at memorizing.

Teaching only by memorizing leaves people walking one of the two roads, both of them dead ends. If they were good at memorization and did well on tests, they left school believing they were educated and smart, even thought the only thing their good grades really measured was their ability to memorize.

The other road is the one taken by people who do not memorize very well (like me) and are categorized as "not-so-smart". School disminished their self-esteem early on. They believed the labels that were put on them. They deem themselves stupid and accept that they are incapable of going very far. These people hate making mistakes because each mistake only reinforces their belief that they are stupid. Many give up because they are unaware that the inability to memorize has no bearing on their potential for success.

Our fear of making mistakes is so ingrained in us that we habitually react to our errors in ways that blind us to the real learning in them.

One of the chief reasons our educational system is in chaos is that it is still closed-minded, archaic and slow to respond to new ideas, new styles, and new ways of being. The worst part is that laws forced kids to attend school and to conform to one-right-answer thinking. Often the only choice kids have is to rebel.

This topic is endless and if I seriously blogged about it, 1 week would not be enough for me. Hence, I conclude this post with a quote:

"Learning to learn is the key. And if your kids have forgotten how, it's only because their knowledge of these primal processes has been chased into hiding by you or too much public schooling."

-Hal Zina Bennett (1972)