PUTRAJAYA, MALAYSIA - The apex-status Universiti Sains Malaysia must ensure that the technical blunder which had confused 4,574 students recently will not happen again.

The warning came from Higher Education secretary-general Datuk Dr Zulkefli A. Hassan, who said that if it happened again, Malaysia's aspiration of having at least one of its local universities in the world's top 100 by 2015 would be abandoned.

"USM must ensure that this will never happen again.

"It must live up to the fundamentals of being an elite university," he told the New Straits Times in an interview yesterday.

While there may be some teething problems faced by USM, Zulkefli said the university must ensure that all fundamentals, in terms of good governance, research and development, quality of lecturers, courses and co-curricular activities, were strictly adhered to.
"There are lessons to learn from this and USM, supposedly our best university, must make sure it never recurs."

Despite the glitch, Zulkefli said USM was still on the right track. "We hope it can assist the government to achieve the desired outcome for it to be one of the world's top 100 universities by 2015."

There are about 30,000 universities worldwide.

USM deputy vice-chancellor (Academic and International Affairs) Prof Ahmad Shukri Mustapa Kamal had apologised unreservedly for the technical problems in May.

About 8,000 students had pre-qualified for USM, from a total of 22,000 students who had applied for admission.

After the final three-day selection from May 26 to 28, USM decided to take in only 3,599. But the university wrongfully listed all the 8,000 students as successful applicants on its website.

USM only realised its mistake about 3pm on May 30, some 24 hours after the names were put up on the website.

The students, who had received offer letters via the website, were left disappointed when they were told of the mistake.

As an apex univesity, USM is given autonomy to organise its own intake.

Zulkefli also said Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) had applied to join the list of research universities.

Besides USM, the other research universities are Universiti Malaya, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Universiti Putra Malaysia.