I refer to the letter All you wanted to know about local u’s.

Reading this letter on local universities, I recalled the experience I had studying at one university in Skudai, Johor. It was the year 1996 and I learned something about local university life that cannot be found else where, or at least I hope so.

Orientation week was a great event and I found out first-hand what this university was doing. Towards the end of the event, during a Q&A session, a lady posed a very good question to the vice- chancellor. She asked:

‘ Saya dari aliran sastera. Kini saya ditawar kursus kejuruteraan kimia. Jadi, bagaimana patut saya harungi kursus ini ?’ This simply translates as ‘I am from the Arts stream. But I was given a place in chemical engineering. How should I go through with this course?’

The answer from the vice-chancellor was shocking. He simply stated that where there is a will, there is a way.

Yes, I understand that in a perfect world, that would be the case. However, that student lacked a lot of fundamentals. I do hope she is doing well today. If you are that lady reading this today, you may want to reply and tell us how you are. But I find it funny that a Grade Three student could get into an engineering course.

Ever wonder how the ethnicity-based quotas are used or misused? By about the time I graduated, the percentage of students who graduated on time (note that I am not mentioning those who actually disappeared) was only about a quarter.

The quality of education at this particular university was just average, at best. There wasn't any passion shown by the lecturers to inspire this generation of students at least. I do hope this has changed for the better.

Tips were provided by our own lecturers prior to most examinations. In fact, most of the questions came out exactly the same as the tips. Talk about serving the grades on a platter. It wasn't easy to get excellent grades at this university. It was also not easy to get very bad grades. The easiest to obtain were average grades. Talk about mediocrity.

With regards to unemployed graduates (yes, we have a large number of graduates of questionable quality), I’ve found this to be true when I’ve had the chance to conduct interviews. You do see quite a number with first-class results but really weak fundamentals. I observed that many theories are memorised instead of understood, which makes fundamental questions a tricky part of the interview.

There are many problems that I would not want to mention - they would just make this letter look more like a book. Well, on the plus side, I'd say there was only a small - make that very small - handful of lecturers who were really good at their jobs. I never missed their classes as I knew I would have a very tough time catching up.