WTH moment

For those of you who are aware of the Malaysia education system would probably have heard that the ministry has instructed (force) all local universities to implement the new academic calendar this year. That decision was made in a haste considering that I first heard about it end of last year. So the new calendar is going to start in September 2011, for Bachelor students.

I'm sure all of you are aware that there is a certain uni in Malaysia that has a huge amount of Diploma students and this uni has branches all over the country. The funny thing is, the new calendar is only implemented for Bachelor degree programs and not the Diploma programs, meaning, there will be 2 separate semesters going on to suit the 2 programs. The idea itself imposes a very chaotic situation. Plus, for Faculty whose lecturers are teaching both programs at the same time, well they can kiss their annual leave goodbye because there is no way that they'll have semester break (the only time lecturers are allowed to take leave).

So the VC of this uni has applied for an exception for the new ruling but it got rejected twice. It seems that the ministry do not even want to consider the difficulties that we're about to face. A colleague of mine questioned the rationale behind the decision made and do you wanna know what is it? "To standardized it with the 'mat sallehs' unis so that the lecturers can attend conferences overseas during the summer break." That was simply it.

Did it ever occur to them that our school system is no longer aligned with the higher learning institution's. Unlike in mat salleh's countries, the academic calendar for schools and unis are the same. This will make it difficult for families to plan their holidays and stuff and their children's holiday break won't be at the same time. Families can no longer bring all of their family members on vacations together because some of them have to go to school.

I'm so feeling the heat right now because my family has already paid flight tickets for all of us to go to Sabah this May. And that was planned since middle of last year. I'm so afraid that my leave application will get rejected because of this new ruling. And to make it sadder, I don't see anybody else objecting to this idea online.

The old system worked fine. Why do you need to make changes yang menyusahkan orang?