Call for Adjustments of Educational Syllabuses in Malaysian Social Science Courses

Malaysia’s industrial landscape is constantly on the shift and ever-evolving, calling for well-equipped and knowledgeable individuals to steer the country towards a competitive business prospect in the future. Today, being knowledgeable alone is not enough without sufficient hands-on experience and acquired skills harnessed throughout the process of learning, especially if the learning process starts at the institutions that supposedly become a stepping stone for these young graduates to enter the real industrial setting.

It is worth noting that a myriad of courses offered by many universities and campuses these days are rather revised and rejuvenated to be aligned with the current expectations set by the industries, wherein some of the critical courses related to engineering as well as health and science have been given such great attention in terms of its practicality so that these graduates can come out and serve the industry with utmost productivity later on. However, there are also several courses out there that have been given less attention for their practicality and neglected from the adequate feed of experience and skills development.

This shortcoming is mostly experienced and can be related to the graduates from the social science stream whereby most of their learning processes were conducted on a theoretical basis and observations compared to hands-on experience and skills. These courses solely depended on students' comprehension of certain concepts without taking it live on the field to see whether the conceptual works as determined or not. The only time these students were allowed to exert their skills and put their theoretical knowledge into action was through the internship period or student activities and group projects.

This is understandable as most of the existing social science paradigms and concepts were rather abstract and understanding daily human-to-human interactions and psychological outlines were hard to translate into practical actions that can be carefully conducted or adopted by the students. The fact that most of our social science courses constantly depend on external reading materials and overseas resources has only complicated the process of further practical embedment of social science knowledge in our own industrial setting. Conversely, the learning processes were deemed more effective for those who are from engineering or other hands-on courses that require the students to interact with the things that they learned.

This issue has led to a niche market of graduates after they completed their studies whereas graduates with enough experience, skills and well-versed in their ‘how-to’ to secure rather promising job opportunities compared to graduates who are only fed with theoretical knowledge. Perhaps, the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) and many other higher learning institutions can take the opportunity for further discussions and allow room for improvements in revising the syllabuses of the social science stream and try to adapt it in our current industrial setting itself.