By Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin
Pix Abd Ra’ai Osman

BANGI, 26 March 2015 – The National University of Malaysia (UKM) is formally engaging with fully-residential schools on a regular basis as a means to assure the respective headmasters and principals that UKM is the top choice for their best students when they apply for a university place.

Briefing a group of about 30 principals of fully residential schools who were specially brought here from all over the country as a tour group today, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Prof Datuk Dr Noor Azlan Ghazali expressed hope that secondary school heads play a more important role in counseling their students on the best available choice for university entry.

Prof Noor Azlan said he wants to reassure them by showing them the facilities at the Bangi and Kuala Lumpur campuses are second to none.

He noted that the programme had be done before, but on certain ‘one-offs’ from time to time. However, beginning this year it would be made a formal annual event for the heads of fully residential schools.

He pointed out to them that beginning this year there will be direct intake of students into public universities which would be short-listing the candidates after being selected by the Education Ministry’s centralized university unit (UPU).

Students would key in their details online and the UPU system would show them the courses for which they were eligible for and likely to be accepted.

UKM courses, he said, now required potential students to go through interviews and they should put the courses that they want to study in UKM into their top four list of selection.

In this way, the Vice-Chancellor pointed out, UKM would have greater control over which candidates would be accepted.

“In addition to the papers submitted by the UPU, we want to get to know the students for the 75 undergraduate programmes so that we can choose.

“we go through the process of screening at the faculty level. We can’t really be sure even if a student scored a 4.0 GPA that he would be the best. We do an interview to determine the suitability off the student to the course he applied for. Mere paper-based results don’t necessarily reflect the  ability and skills. In the context of the programmes, we want to ensure that that courses are suitable for the students,” he explained.

In such a situation, he explained, the principals could influence their best students to give priority to UKM in their top four choices, since it is a premier research university.

Also present at the briefing organised by the Centre For Corporate Communications is its director Prof Datin Dr Norizan Abdul Razak.

The group later went on a tour starting with the Bangi campus where they visited the Natural History Gallery, the Chocolate laboratory, the Moot Cout, the Cell Fuel Institute and the PERMATAPintar Centre for gifted children.

After lunch they were shown around the UKM Medical Centre in Cheras and the Medical Molecular Biology Institute .