LETTER | Dear YB Dr Maszlee Malik,

First of all, I would like to express my heartiest congratulations to you on your appointment as the new minister of education. I am a lecturer at a public university and I regret to write this open letter to you anonymously.

As of now, academicians in public universities are still bonded by various internal rules and circulars which prohibit us from expressing ourselves publicly, moreover on issues that are critical to the government. I hope such restriction and self-censorship will come to an end under your watch since the rakyat had voted for change.

Foremost, I wish to draw your attention with urgent trepidation on the implementation of the integrated cumulative grade point average assessment (ICGPA). You were an academician until just a couple of months ago and I am sure you have been briefed on it.

The ICGPA was mooted as a "holistic evaluation" for public university students by using a spider chart to illustrate a set of pre-determined attributes. The idea is ill-conceived for various reasons as follow:

1. Lack of rationale - At the inception, the main idea of this "holistic evaluation" is to lend support to the proposition that there are other intrinsic values in students that should be considered apart from the grades and figures manifested in their academic transcript. When it was first proposed, ICGPA had even included the facet of "unity and patriotism".

The feasibility in assessing such concealed attribute with university syllabus had been everyone’s guessing. Although the said facet had since removed, it just showed that the whole convoluted idea was derived haphazardly without proper study and rationale.

2. Contains unmeasurable attributes - In the various versions of the ICGPA chart that changed little by little over time, a number of other specific attributes displayed in these charts are almost immeasurable using academic syllabus. Any behavioural researcher worth his/her salt would testify that attributes such as ethics, values, attitudes, social skills, responsibilities, professionalism, and leadership can only be measured with psychometric instruments.

The development of such instruments take years of rigorous testing for validity and reliability. Answers to these questions are not objectives, meaning there is no one correct or wrong answer to every personality question. Exam questions for university programmes related to mathematics, physics, finance, statistics etc. are very objective, i.e. an answer is either correct or otherwise. Now lecturers in universities are expected to work around it.

3. Ambiguously defined attributes and forced assessments - Various attributes such as teamwork, values, attitudes, social skills, professionalism and leadership are vague in definition. For example, what is the meaning of values? Could it be self-confidence, commitment, perseverance, integrity etc, all which are not related? If the “values” attribute is high in the ICGPA chart, what values exactly does the chart reflect? Also, what is the meaning of attitudes? How could these attributes be evaluated in university exams or assignments?

These have led to a suggestion by the management to lecturers to embed irrelevant questions forcibly into their assessments just to fulfil the documentation requirement of ICGPA which is set to be implemented soon. It is preposterous to reconcile personality tests with academic assessments merely to fill up some parts of the ICGPA chart which all in all serves no purpose.

4. Ridiculous documentation - all university courses now have to break down every single mark in every single assessment acquired by every single student to construct the chart over the duration of their study. For example, if a course has 50 questions for midterm, every single question has to be classified accordingly to reflect the stipulated attributes in the ICGPA.

Then each student would have a spreadsheet of 50 columns for marks entry. Some lecturers who are teaching faculty core courses in a non-research university could have up to 600 students per person per semester. That would be 50 x 600 = 30,000 spreadsheet cells of manual data entry just for a midterm exam!

If assignments, quizzes and final exam are included, the amount of data entry work could be devastating and depressing. Worst, weightages are assigned to each of the ICGPA attributes, meaning more manual work awaits after the data entry of marks.

For a record, the window for marking final exam transcripts and marks tabulation could be as tight as 10 days before the publication of results. The ICGPA scheme is asserting more unnecessary pressure on lecturers to keep up with the already excessive administrative and documentation work. This is on top of other unavoidable documentation requirements such as MQA and ISO.

Energy and time wasted on ICGPA are better spent on student consultation, post-graduate supervision, publication of journals, chapter book or books, attending conferences and grant-chasing. These are parts of a lecturer’s KPI every year apart from teaching. Just a gentle reminder, there are only 12 months in a year. The workloads in a public university can be quite overwhelming.

5. Much work but little to show - Generally, the whole idea of ICGPA is to construct a totally unnecessary spider chart. The quality of a student is easily reflected in the conventional CGPA. No matter how one puts it, a graduate with a 3.50 CGPA is definitely better than one with a 2.00 CGPA.

Thus, the area covered in the ICGPA spider chart for a 3.50 CGPA achiever would be certainly larger compared to a 2.00 pointer. Where is the need for a visual illustration of results which requires so much of extra work when one could easily inspect the academic transcript of a student?

For instance, if a student in a finance programme is a consistent high- scorer across courses such as Calculus, Econometrics and Statistics, then he/she must be good in calculation. Likewise, if he/she scored poorly in English for Communication, Corporate Communication, Project Presentation etc., then the grades are self-explanatory.

I understand that there must be some pressure within the ministry to implement an initiative that has to consume so much of money and energy. I am sure you will not budge to an idea that is not right. Academicians in public universities are often told proudly that the ICGPA is conceived in Malaysia and is one of its kind in the world. I am sure there must be some reason why the rest of the world is not doing it.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.