Ex-UEC task force chairman to submit report to Zambry next month

 Eddin Khoo accuses education ministers from both past and present administrations of lying about the status of the report and task force.

Eddin Khoo commended higher education minister Zambry Abd Kadir’s willingness to receive the UEC task force’s report.

PETALING JAYA:

The report on the feasibility of recognising the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC) is expected to be submitted to higher education minister Zambry Abd Kadir by the end of July, former task force chairman Eddin Khoo said.

Khoo praised Zambry’s openness to receiving the report, contrasting him with education ministers from previous and current administrations, whom he accused of lying about the status of both the report and the task force.

“I will submit it at the end of July, but Zambry already met with me, and he’s willing to receive it,” he said at a forum organised by the Allianz Centre for Governance titled “Nation-building and Inclusion in Higher Education: Looking at Higher Education Entrance Requirements” last night.

When Pakatan Harapan formed the government in 2018, it established a task force to gather views on recognising the UEC – one of the coalition’s election pledges for the 14th general election.

It was led by Khoo and included then Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement president Raimi Abdul Rahim and then Dong Zong deputy president Tan Yew Sing.

Its work was interrupted by the change of government in 2020, although the committee had reportedly completed its report. Then education minister Radzi Jidin subsequently said no report had been submitted and that the task force had been dissolved on Feb 29 that year.

During the forum, Khoo outlined several recommendations in the report, proposing that UEC holders seeking admission into public universities be required to pass subjects including history and civic studies, and obtain a credit in SPM Bahasa Melayu.

“Combine all those things, and we introduced something that, I think, was so crucial to our education, but now they’ve gotten rid of it: the general paper.

“Do a general paper, get a credit in BM, and you enter. The rest are just tactical issues… quota and all these kinds of things, they can be discussed,” he said.

The general paper, commonly associated with the Cambridge A-Level system, tests a student’s ability to think critically and write analytically across broad topics such as society, politics, and current affairs, rather than assessing subject-specific knowledge. Its Malaysian equivalent, Pengajian Am, remains a compulsory subject for STPM.

Khoo said he opposed the current practice of UEC students sitting for SPM alongside their UEC examinations, describing this as “double-tracking”.

Recalling his experience as a lecturer at Universiti Malaya, he said one former UEC student could provide dictionary definitions of words but had difficulty applying them in context.

“I would say, what is the meaning of the word used? And he would give me a dictionary definition of what that word was, but no idea how to use it,” he said.

The general paper proposal, however, was rejected by Dong Zong, he added.

“Dong Zong shut it down. They don’t want a general paper. Just a credit is enough,” Khoo said. - FMT