I agree that merit should prevail in the intake of students into public universities. However, this is best based on one single entrance examination. There can never be a fair assessment of students if there are too many entrance qualifications.

The fact that many bumiputra students had qualified themselves to enter university is because most of them had gone through the matriculation programme, a programme which is much easier to go through and absolutely not at par with the Sijil Tinggi Pelajaran Malaysia or STPM.

The matriculation programme is only for one year. It was first implemented to enable more bumiputra to enter university when it was found that many of them could not make it at the STPM level.

And the reason that many non-bumiputera students did not wish to sit for the STPM, which is a two-year programme, is due to the proven fact that it is not an easy examination to pass and neither would it guarantee them to be able to do courses of their choice. Thus, many of them had opted to follow some other paths to fulfil their dreams.

I have experienced handling both the matriculation and STPM students for many years and also teaching these students when they enter university. My fair and sincere assessment on these two systems is that students found it tougher to get through the STPM examination and those who entered university after obtaining the STPM were found to be much more mature and were superior performers compared with those who went through the matriculation.

Another aspect worth mentioning here is that marks awarded for the matriculation courses were partly based on coursework leaving it much to the discretion of the teachers teaching them. They need only to do another portion of the mid-semester and the final examinations that will be added to their coursework marks.

In some cases, even the mid-semester examinations were not standardised — hence, the integrity of which was questionable. Besides that, with too many institutions involved in handling the matriculation (including the franchised ones tutored by part-time teachers), it was near impossible to standardise the whole system. Again, each centre had its own way of pleasing the sponsor, thus rendering the quality of education received by students a subject of ridicule.

Let's be fair to the young innocent minds. Do we need to discriminate them with many university entrance examinations (I suppose, Malaysia is the only country doing this!)?

Why can't we be bold enough to just have one standardised examination to be taken by all Malaysians who want to pursue their studies at the university level. This would help enhance the credibility and quality of our education.

Furthermore, upon completion of their studies our graduates will then be considered as those who had competed well enough to earn a degree and are truly capable to compete in the job market.

The present system we are advocating, I am afraid, will finally end up in having one group of race predominantly studying at public universities and another distinctive group vying for the private universities.

How would prospective employees evaluate our graduates then? As it is now, many Malay graduates are unemployed and most of them have found it difficult to get jobs in the private sector for one reason or another.

This situation is definitely going to aggravate if meritocracy is not the yardstick used for university entrance. And if this keeps on happening then we have to keep on blaming our education system again.