University of Malaya imposes new rules

• All applicants need to attend and pass compulsory interview
• Medicine & Surgery, Dental Surgery and Pharmacy require perfect scores

In a bid to become one of the top 100 universities in the world by 2015, University of Malaya is raising the bar of excellence, once again. For this academic session 2013/2014, all students applying for admissions to UM are required to attend and pass the interview.  Previously, only those applying for law, architecture and education-related programmes had to go interview.

The interview will help UM academic staffs and representatives of the faculty to identify the best candidates for each programme. It will assess students' communication skills and readiness level as well as their self-confidence, professional appearance, and interest level.  According to UM, the interview structure and medium of language used will be based on the relevant requirements of the specific courses.

Another upgrade is that UM requires a perfect cumulative grade point average (CPGA) score of 4.00 for critical courses such as Bachelor of Medicine * Bachelor of Sugery (MBBS), Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) and Pharmacy. This change however won't have much impact since almost all who were offered places previously had perfect scores caused by stiff competition.