A student association has hit out at those seeking to politicise and racialise the failure of an STPM top scorer to secure a spot in Universiti Malaya’s accountancy course, describing them as “irresponsible”.
The National Student Consultative Council Alumni Association (Alumni MPPK) said Edward Wong’s failure to secure a place in the programme had nothing to do with discrimination but was the result of “healthy competition” among top scorers.
It said official data showed an increase in the number of SPM top scorers from 2019 to 2024, saying this made the selection of students for critical courses such as accountancy, medicine and law “even more competitive”.
“It is unreasonable to politicise the issue by claiming that the system is obscure and racist.
“Meritocracy must be respected and students need to be realistic and accept the fact that competition is getting stiff,” Alumni MPPK president Amir Asyraf Sabri said in a statement.
Amir also said that politicians should be mature and help improve the existing systems instead of misleading the public.
Yesterday, the higher education department said Wong, who achieved a perfect 4.0 CGPA and scored 99.9% for co-curricular activities, was ranked 1,129th among 2,291 eligible applicants for UM, while only 85 places for accountancy were available in his top choice university this year.
It said Wong was instead offered a place in a bachelor of management with honours programme at a leading research university, his fifth choice.
Wong’s case gained public attention after MCA president Wee Ka Siong raised it at a press conference where he called the centralised Unit Pusat Universiti (UPU) admission process “flawed” and “unfair”.
He said Wong was later accepted into the same UM accountancy course through open intake, but that the fee of RM83,800 was nearly 10 times higher than the RM8,300 UPU-subsidised route.
