5 star but not a world class university

Excellent but not a world class university. in line with out motto "WE LEAD"

According to The Star today, USM was named as the best overall university in survey..Although, UKM held the highest rank in World Class Universities list, USM is more popular when comes to research.

The main advantage of universities in Klang valley is they can easily find postgraduate students. Unlike us in such a small town (engineering campus in particular), we can barely find students. The best thing we can do is to call up friends from other universities and ask their favour to find students for us. I can't imagine to do research work without postgraduate students..In order to maintain the highest position, I guess the top management must do something about it..or else it will affect the performance in the future...

here is the full article about it...

USM named best overall university in survey

By KAREN CHAPMAN and SARAH CHEW

PUTRAJAYA: Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) has been named best overall university in an academic reputation survey carried out by the National Accreditation Board (LAN).

It had a score of five, which is equivalent to excellent.

Of the 10 domains in the survey, which include the perception of respondents according research quality, academic resources, reputation of academics, quality programmes and the university of choice for students, USM scored mostly fours and fives.

According to the scale, one is weak, two unsatisfactory, three satisfactory, four good, five excellent and six outstanding.

In an immediate response, USM vice-chancellor Prof Datuk Dzulkifli Abdul Razak said it was a good start.

“Now we have to work harder to maintain this position and lead the pack,” he said.

Asked why none of the four research universities had obtained “excellent” or “outstanding” in terms of research quality, he believed the universities had to improve their applied research.

“This is as opposed to basic research, which is laying the foundations and viewed by the public as having little application,” he added.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed said the survey, based on information from 2005, was sent to 954 individuals with 272 responding.

“Outstanding could be seen as world class. Based on the perception of the respondents in the survey, our universities have not reached that status yet,” he said when asked why no institution had been classified as “outstanding”.