LECTURERS’ COMMITMENT AND STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT: A PRAGMATIC VIEW FROM EXISTING TEACHING EVALUATION RESULT (TER)

In this research report presented herein, the TER is used as the basis to ascertain if the commitment of the lecturers can lead to academic excellence of the students. The TER is comprised of questionnaires in which the foundation students are the respondents (N=433) in assessing the courses as well as the lecturers. The performances of the students in the form of final exam grades are also used as the basis of the performance of the students. The respondents of the foundation students were comprised of 85% Indian, 5% Chinese, and 10% Malay. There are more than 30% of the students who have obtained a grade of A- and better for the TER < 80%. Also, there are about 10% of the students who have secured a grade of A- and better for the TER >= 80%. This indicates that a high TER score does not guarantee that the students will perform well academically. The distribution of the grades based on the courses does not follow a definitive pattern or any particular statistical distribution. The highest and lowest mean score on courses are found and that the mean scores of at least two groups of courses are significantly different at α = 0.05. There are a total of 4 lecturers teaching the surveyed 7 courses described herein. Again, it can be seen that the mean score of the grades of at least two groups of lecturers are significantly different at α = 0.05. The findings supported the fact that there are no consistencies to reflect that the students’ performances are actually related to the TER scores. The method of Kolmogorov-Smirnov was used to obtain the existence of normality. The results of the test indicated that all of the variables are generally not normally distributed even at a significant level of α = 0.01. It was found that 13 out of 17 of the questionnaires are considered to be significant at α = 0.01. Another 3 out of 17 of the questionnaires are considered to be significant at α = 0.05. Only 1 out of 17 of the questionnaires is found to be not significant. At best, the correlation obtained represents only weak relationship. Due to the limitation and the unavailability of matching each student to their evaluation towards the lecturers, the results presented above is weakly conclusive. It is recommended that future research in similar areas to incorporate on matching of the students be made with the lecturers to obtain reliable and conclusive result.