THE Education Ministry is still waiting for the final report on the recognition of the Unified Examination Certificate (UEC), which was supposed to be handed over at the end of October.

Minister Maszlee Malik said the ministry and the committee are in contact to discuss the updates on the report.

He said committee, headed by arts and culture advocate Eddin Khoo, has already met with relevant stakeholders and is in the midst of preparing the final report before it can be passed to the ministry.

“I am always in contact with the committee. They are doing their best to complete the final report.

“They work hard in meeting up as many relevant parties as they could with a small number of officers,” Mazlee told reporters at the Parliament lobby today.

Khoo has said that his committee needed till the end of last month to hand over the report as more input was sought from MPs.

He said a study of the UEC and how the government can recognise the Chinese secondary school certificate involved more than just looking at the UEC itself, but had to take into account the context of Malaysian history and the current education system.

UEC is a standardised test for independent Chinese secondary school students organised by the United Chinese School Committees’ Association of Malaysia since 1975.

The exam was launched after the Chinese schools refused to use English as the medium of instruction and join the national education system at the end of the 1960s. At the time, there were 62 such schools nationwide, with a third of them located in Sabah and Sarawak.

Maszlee had previously said the report will be discussed in Parliament and the decision to either recognise or not recognise the UEC will be announced by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Both Pakatan Harapan and the previous Barisan Nasional government had pledged to recognise the UEC.

Five states – Sarawak, Sabah, Penang, Selangor and Malacca – recognise the exam and allow those with the certificate to join the state’s institutions of higher learning and civil service. – November 7, 2019.