Some thoughts/Q regarding JPA scholarship policy

By Mary Mag,

Letters
Just wanted to share some of my thoughts/questions regarding the JPA scholarships policy.
I believe it is important to recognize and reward merit and tap young potential , so it is important to continue with ‘merit scholarships’.
But the government must clearly differentiate between ‘merit scholarships’ (that must be based solely on merit criteria) and others based on ethnic or socio-economic considerations.
At the moment, there is no clear demarcation and there is still a lack of transparency regarding many aspects. As taxpayers, we have the right to know all the information.
Regarding JPA overseas scholarships for SPM high achievers, the practice now is to send them to UiTM or slelected private colleges for ‘preparatory/foundation’ courses. A few questions arise:

1. Why send them for these courses, at the expense of taxpayers money, when the top scorers can easily get fee waiver from most local colleges to do their A-levels/Austmat/Canadian pre-U courses? After the students complete the A-levels/Austmat/Canadian pre-U, the government can select the top-scorers and then only sent them to the best universities overseas. By then, some of them will already be offered scholarships from other countries/universities and the pool of qualified candidates will be smaller.
   
2. Why not get the SPM top scorers to sit for the American SAT exams immediately and then sponsor those with high scores who are able to get into the top US universities?
   
3. How much is being spent on these ‘preparatory/foundation’ courses and how are these colleges selected? Is there cronyism involved? I have heard that some of the these colleges do not have competent lecturers and the top students even point out the mistakes made by these lecturers!
   
4. What are the criteria for selection of students for scholarships? Why are there still racial quotas if it is supposed to be on merit?
   
5. If it is a ‘merit scholarship’ why do they still consider the income of the parents?
   
6. Shouldn’t it be a separate category for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, irrespective of ethnicity?
   
7. How do they check the accuracy of the income -related information given by the applicants?
   
8. What are the assessment criteria during the interview of candidates? Why do they have to go through an interview? How do they assess students during group interviews, as being practiced now?
   
9. Many students can score straight As for SPM because of all the tuition and coaching. That does not mean they are genuine top scholars who will do well in external exams.
   
10. There is still a lot of suspicion and claims of double standards/cheating/rigging of SPM exam results, not necessarily during the marking, as it can also happen at the recording/keying in stage at the Ministry. If marks can be tampered with for the CLP exams, what guarantee is there that it doesn’t happen in the SPM/STPM exams?
    
11. Why doesn’t the government publicize all the information regarding scholarships given out by PETRONAS, MARA, Bank Negara, Securities Commission, and all the GLCs? This is still taxpayers money, right?
    

Although JPA scholarships only affect a very small percentage of the population, it always gets a lot of political mileage.
I wish politicians will pay more attention to more basic issues that affect the larger population – e.g. the quality of primary and secondary education, wage levels, inflation rate, misuse of public funds, etc…