Hope and Standards with MQF

Hi! 

Quick hello from our workshop organized by the School of Mathematical Sciences, USM, here in Penang. It's Friday prayer time, so a quick pause for me to type this. As some of you know, our school has a new Dean, and I'm part of the new team helping him out. So, for this workshop, we started the day with a fun get-together with our admin team – lots of smiles and chatting. But then, the management team is split off to do some serious thinking. 

The entire management and administration team.

All cheerful. Before the brain scratching session.

The mood during the session was entirely serious. No fun at all. 😂

So, why are we spending our Friday focusing on this MQF thing for our postgraduate programs? Well, think of the MQF – the Malaysian Qualifications Framework – as a national standard for education quality in Malaysia.  Hopefully, by ensuring our postgraduate programs align with these standards, we're paving the way for our graduates to earn better qualifications.

It's like having a gold seal of approval on their hard work and the knowledge they've gained. This helps our graduates when they're looking for jobs, pursuing further studies elsewhere, or even just showcasing their achievements. It also means that the way we teach, assess, and structure our courses meets a certain benchmark of excellence.

What's crucial right now is ensuring everything is clearly documented. We need to make sure all the courses offered at the School of Mathematical Sciences properly align with the Legislation in Higher Education (2) – Act 679. It might sound technical, but our goal is to make this alignment straightforward for everyone at the school to understand.

Even though PR isn't our thing, Wen Eng and I still need to get the whole story.

So in short, today we're working on some important papers for our postgraduate courses. It's all about making sure our programs follow the rules set by MQF. It's a bit of a brain-scratching session, trying to make the right decisions. 

Wish us luck as we try to sort things out as much as we can when we get back to discussion.