MQA announces top higher education institutions in Engineering, Hospitality & Tourism, Medicine, Pharmacy and Sciences

• Taylor's University bags Tier 6 while MSU and UiTM receive Tier 5 in Hospitality and Tourism
• For Engineering, Curtin, Monash, MMU, UiTM and UTP receive Tier 5
• UM takes lead for Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy

The Malaysian Qualifications Agency (MQA), responsible for quality assurance of higher education for both public and private sectors, has released the results of its latest Discipline-based Rating System or D-SETARA today. The new rating system is different from SETARA. The former categorises universities as a whole using a tier system based on the Malaysian Qualifications Framework whereas D-SETARA  assesses the quality of teaching and learning of a certain field of study only.

D-SETARA  focuses on four clusters of disciplines: Engineering; Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy; Health Sciences; and Hospitality and Tourism. Participation in D-SETARA is voluntary; invitations were made to all HEIs offering undergraduate programmes and have had the first batch of graduates in 2011.

The Engineering discipline however, involved only HEIs which offer four-year degree programmes. The number of institutions rated in each discipline were 25 (Engineering), 15 (Medicine, Dentistry and Pharmacy), 14 (Health Sciences) and seven (Hospitality and Tourism).  Each discipline was classified according to 6 tiers - Tier 1 as Weak, Tier 2 Satisfactory, Tier 3 Good, Tier 4 Very Good, Tier 5 Excellent and Tier 6 as Outstanding.