Focusing on quality

The Sunday Times of London included the 10th anniversary edition of the University Guide in its September 23 issue.

The Sunday Times classifies Britain's universities according to various criteria. At the top of the league table for 10 years, Cambridge University is classified as Britain's best university.

It is worth looking at what has made Cambridge a famous university and how it withstands competition.

What is interesting for our University to note is the statement made by The Sunday Times that on the world stage Cambridge competes primarily with American institutions. That it does so on an equal footing, despite a huge disparity in funding, is a tribute to both Cambridge's financial efficiency, and of course, its intellectual capacity.

The bureaucratic and top-heavy running of the financial system at our University questions our financial efficiency. Efforts have recently been made to beef up the staff at the finance department.

The next step should be the decentralisation of absolute control of certain amounts of money allocated to the faculties and departments to allow them to use the very limited finance more efficiently with less money spent on overheads. Such a system would, of course, require stringent auditing.

Excellence starts with students' quality at entry. There are 14,000 sixth formers every year applying for Cambridge. Only 3,300 are offered a place at the university and they all would have achieved straight As at A-level or the highest scores in the International Baccalaureate.

Our University requires Bs at A-level for certain courses, Cs for other courses and even Ds for others. These are some of the lowest requirements compared to other top universities in Europe. Can't we start improving our entry grades by small increases, starting, say, with requiring a B and two Cs at A-level?

Some students are really struggling in their first year, and a number of the University academics and students themselves see low entry grades as being a major reason for holding a class from achieving outstanding levels.

Rather than spending their time with the brighter students to achieve excellence, lecturers and professors have to spend hours of work to cover topics that ought to have been dealt with thoroughly at sixth form. Now that we have a better-organised sixth form and excellent teachers, should we not expect students joining the University to be well versed with very basic Mathematics and language capabilities?

Cambridge's vice-chancellor, Alison Richard, who incidentally is the first woman to hold the position full-time, has spent 30 years working at Yale, University in the US, with a career including that of a chief academic and administrative officer. Incidentally, Yale has in the not too distant past shown an interest in having a presence on the island in association with the University of Malta.

The rector, Professor Juanito Camilleri, has also recently visited the United States to look at possible collaboration with top universities.

At Cambridge, 36 subjects secured top rating for quality of teaching during a decade of reviews conducted by fellow academics for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. The Sunday Times' University Guide comments that this is "not surprising when you consider that many of the academics have written the textbooks too".

It is therefore very encouraging to see professors from our University publishing books that are being used as texts in universities in England and all over Europe.

Another feather in the cap of Cambridge University is that it provides a well-rounded education. It is precisely this topic that the Professor Camilleri has chosen for this year's opening ceremony of the University's academic year, namely, "Well rounded education... beyond certification".

The rector stated: "I have chosen this theme because I strongly believe that the University experience - and indeed the process of life-long learning as a whole - should extend beyond formal curricular and examination structures."

It is well worth noting that the rector's efforts have probably succeeded to obtain essential funds that are sorely needed to purchase equipment for modern laboratories and to enable the construction of ICT and other buildings.