UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MALAYSIA (UTM)

UHAK2132 (01): PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT
SEMESTER 2 2019/2020

Program : 3-SKTN

Title : The Roles of University Students in Shaping

Advance and Ethical Nation with Integrity
Lecturer : EN. AZLAH BIN MD. ALI

Name : LEONG ZHENG HAO

Matric : A17KT0109
Number

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 INTRODUCTION

The tertiary education system in Malaysia is expected to produce contributive graduates in

nation-building. According to the statistic from the Ministry of Education Malaysia’s Graduate
Tracer Study (as cited by D’Silva, 2018), there are 21 public universities and 38 private
universities are producing 51000 bachelor’s graduates per year in average. The tertiary school
enrolment rate in Malaysia has increased rapidly from 3.82% in 1979 to 45.13% in 2018 (The
Global Economy, n. d.). We could not deny the fact that the tertiary education has already been
popularized and prevalent among the Malaysians nowadays to keep up with the trend of
Industrial Revolution 4.0. It is part and parcel among the Malaysians in producing competitive
labours in every industry including both public and private sectors.

Nowadays, completing a Bachelor’s degree has become a minimum requirement for

labours at most companies to recruit newbies. However, a Bachelor’s degree does not guarantee
a wholesome fresh graduate as it is only an academic transcript that measuring one’s academic
performance. While there are still people using their academic result as a yardstick to judge
ones, ethical behaviour has now become a vital part in recruiting labours in most industries.
Ethical behaviour is an acting in ways consistent with the typical positive values in ones’
society. Besides, university students are playing a vital role in contributing efforts to
developing our country from a status of a third world nation to a developed state. Malaysia has
been suffering brain-draining issue at the outset and this is one of the factors that Malaysia still
at the limit to reach a state of advance country.

This project will study on initiatives that can be taken by university students to enhance
our country to be an advance, ethical and integrity state. This project will be separated into 3
main sections to explain on the ways to be taken by university students. For each section,
definition will be given to define each specific term to give a better picture for an advance
nation, an ethical nation, as well as an integrity state. Lastly, all of these ways will be related
to industrial professions.

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 UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ROLE IN BUILDING AN ADVANCE NATION

According to the Prime Minister’s Office of Malaysia (n.d.), the prospect view of an advance
nation should have society with several factors as such: infused by strong moral and ethical
values, democratic and tolerant, economically equitable, progressive and prosperous, as well
as in full possession of a dynamic economy. Besides, a fully developed nation should also have
society living in peace with tolerance to diversity among each other. These have been our
challenges to develop Malaysia into an advance country as stated in the Vision 2020. It is
clearly that university students should play a vital role in realising the prospect of an ideal
Malaysia.

In order to build a progressive and prosperous community, it is undeniable that

mastering multiple skills and sciences is the most important first step that should be taken by
the university students. Nowadays, the revolution of technology drifts in a blink of an eye.
Everyone is a player in the technology race but not only limited to those developed countries.
Lacking of experts and talents has always been impeding the development of nation in our
country in this century. As a university student, we should practice lifelong learning as our
habit to get ourselves improved and updated with latest knowledge and informations. Lifelong
learning is a habit that encourage us to keep learning without limiting ourselves at a certain
extent of ages. Lifelong learning not only could broaden our views yet it helps us to master
various new skills that applicable to our industry. This indeed could boost our ability to
compete with others and not to get eliminated in this cutthroat Industrial Revolution 4.0.

Learning a new language could make us a better communicator and gets a higher
capability to compete with others. Spending little time by using phone applications to learn
new language everyday does not spend much time yet it enhances our communicating skill and
mastering a new language at the same time. According to a report released by the Northern
Illinois University (2015), both private and public sectors agreed that speaking multiple
languages is an important criterion to consider in recruiting employees and nearly 80% of the
companies agreed that it is helpful in maintaining client relations via effective communication
skill in more than a language. Indeed, the workplaces nowadays are demanding for employees

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with multiple effective language skills. Mastering new language via lifelong learning skill
would be an imperative bonus for university students in building progressive community.

Other than learning new languages, university students should also keep improving
themselves by mastering various soft and hard skills in order to survive in a competitive
community. Soft skills are known as interpersonal skills that relatable to interaction with people
whereas hard skills are known as technical abilities or skill sets (Doyle, 2020). Academic result
is no longer the most important criterion to be selected as a good employee nowadays as most
of the manual loading and professional works could be replaced by the new born invention,
artificial intelligence (Bennett, 2020). However, hard skills such as proficiency in foreign
language and computer programming are still necessary and widely demanded by the market.
And, soft skills such as communication skill, flexibility, time management and so on are also
would be highlights for employee to be employed. This is due to possessing strong skills could
ensure a productive and collaborative working environment. Thus, university students should
practice lifelong learning to adapt to the working environment in this century.

Besides that, to build a progressive community, university students should always keen
to learning new things. Making free time to read on non-scholarly books helps in gaining extra
knowledge that would not be taught in the classroom. Not to mention, most of the successful
well-known community leaders practice reading habit every day, to name a few, Warren Buffet,
Mark Cuban and Bill Gates. While most of the busiest successful peoples keep reading daily,
busy should not be a reasonable excuse for us to not read. There are numerous fruitful books
to read to inspire youngsters especially university students at the bookstores. If it is not easy to
take some time on reading, we could also watch inspirational talks online during time gap to
keep gaining knowledge. Every little knowledge to be internalised would be the most valuable
assets of ourselves.

Apart from that, Malaysia has been suffering brain drain and causing a talent shortage
that could slow down the development progress (Hasnan, 2019). According to a survey done
by Wong (2010), the reasons that drive Malaysian living abroads are political and economic
situation, better education opportunity and better job prospect. In the same survey, Wong found
that those Malaysians who living abroad would decide to return to their hometowns if their
comebacks could make a different in Malaysia. In this phenomenon, we can see that brain drain

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occurs due to lack of confidence towards our country but not due to unpatriotism. Indeed, we
should educate the youngsters to contribute their efforts in nation-building and recover their
confidence in making changes in Malaysia. The university students should bear the
responsibility in advancing our country and to be confident to our homeland. Perhaps, we
should also make the university students to feel needed and playing a part and parcel role in
developing our country in order to ease the brain drain phenomenon. In short, curing the brain
drain phenomenon could curb the problem of talent shortage in our country.

In a nutshell, university students are the assets of our country to build an advance nation.
The university students should improve themselves to keep track with the trending technology
and knowledge nowadays. At the same time, we should also value their efforts in making
changes and acknowledge them as our reliance in shaping a better future of Malaysia.

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 UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ROLE IN BUILDING AN ETHICAL NATION

An American author, Rushworth Moulton Kidder, defined the word “ethics” as the science of
moral duty (1990). Elder and Paul, the American psychologists, define ethics as a set of
concepts and principles that guiding people in determining good and bad behaviours (2005).
According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995), ethics is the moral principles of
a particular tradition, group or individual. The definition of ethics from above are using moral
as the basis of ethics. Thus, ethical means that behaviours that practicing moral values and are
acceptable by the community. An ethical country should have a community that practice moral
behaviour in any sort of situations and places.

According to Lipman (2016), the Global Business Ethics Survey 2016 shown that Japan,
Spain and Germany ranked the most ethical countries whereas Russia, Brazil and Spain ranked
the least ethical countries to do business in. The survey was done by observing misconduct and
rules violations that happened at the workplaces such as bribery and fraud. Employees in every
country were found lying to many different groups including employees, customers, vendors
and the publics. This phenomenon should be a concerning issue that ethical behaviours are
being neglected to be cultivated in workplaces. It brings detrimental effect to publics and their
own countries that they suffer losing of confidence of clients and tarnishing their reputable
confidence image in worldwide. Hence, ethical behaviour is a significant habits that everyone
should practise especially university students before they are exposed to the community
saturated with unethical actions.

In order to build an ethical nation, university students should begin to practice

professional ethics since their tertiary education stage. The first step should be taken by
university students is to understand and to learn about ethical behaviours via formal classes.
Moral values such as honesty, responsibility, compassionate and so on should be learnt and
internalized by university students. This indeed could shape a mature thinking students that
reflective about the importance of moral. University students would eventually be
comprehensive about the controversial moral issues that we have nowadays in Malaysia. By
having a more comprehensive thinking about the moral issues, university students get to make
a better decision by applying ethical values but not only using benefits as their yardstick.

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 After understanding the working of ethical values, they should internalise and should
start behaving ethically in their routines. University has numerous social circles for university
students to cultivate ethical values such as student clubs, student associations, service learning,
and abundant of school activities. Students usually are given as much responsibility for self-
governance in organisational activities that they could create events and setting policies as well
as procedures. Students often learn best by doing and get to experience the operation of an
organisation in community via joining clubs or associations in schools. This would be a great
opportunity for them to involving in a grand social circles to cultivate ethical values. It is
important to behave ethically while doing an important leading role in clubs or associations.
For instance, being a club treasurer should be honest and should prioritise the benefits of clubs
and club members while allocating funds for different purposes. In fact, this would help them
to learn bearing the consequences and impacts for the decisions they made.

Moreover, university students could practice ethical behaviour by obeying to school

rules and regulations constructed by schools’ authority. School rules and regulations are
guidelines for actions of students in alma mater and it evaluates the actions of students in terms
of right and wrong. Every university student should play his role in abiding by the school rules
and regulations in order to create an ethical learning environment just like how the community
abiding by the national laws to shape an ethical country as well. To illustrate, university student
should avoid themselves from plagiarising while completing projects and assignments and
protect their works from being plagiarised by others. They should understand how plagiarism
could interfere their opportunities to learn and to understand. This can be a good reasoning for
them to cultivate the value of honesty and independence in learning environment.

To conclude, ethical behaviour would eventually become our habit if we tend to practise
it at the first place. Thus, university students should begin to cultivate ethical and moral
behaviour at the early stage when they just enrol in university. An ethical community would
be shaped if we insist to abide by moral values and to have complete comprehension about
ethics before exposing ourselves to the environment that saturated with unethical actions.

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 UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ROLE IN ENHANCING NATIONAL INTEGRITY

Integrity is the quality of being honesty and possessing strong moral principles. National
integrity is a yardstick by which a country people are judged abroad from other countries. In
2004, our Former Prime Minister, Dato’ Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi endeavoured to
strengthen national integrity and ethics that he had established a National Integrity Plan (NIP)
with a great vision, “to establish a fully moral and ethical society whose citizens are strong in
religious and spiritual values and imbued with the highest ethical standards”. The NIP
identified five main priors: to reduce corruption and malpractices of power; to increase the
efficiency of the bureaucratic system; to enhance corporate governance and business ethics; to
strengthen family institutions; and to improve the quality of life. In short, its aims to create a
nation with society that upholds high moral values and ethical principles to the extent that it
becoming a national integrity. However, what is the students’ roles in promoting national
integrity?

The university students should create a conducive culture environment in schools and
in school clubs or associations. A conducive environment is a community in which the people
insist and enthusiastic about cultivating the culture of ethics and integrity. In other words,
people in conducive environment tend to be the vigilance on leadership to keep their promises
and to root out malpractices of leadership. For example, Students Representative Council (SRC)
in universities should represents the students to drive on transparent bureaucracy of school
authority. Besides, students have the right to vote on their ideal nominees to represent them
and to lead them into a better conducive environment in schools yet the students are playing
the role as a vigilance on SRC to avoid from malpractices. This mechanism, by way of
illustration, works in reality such that the multimedia workers play the role as a surveillance to
attract public attention on the public governance involving in bribery, corruption, malpractices
and abuse of power. Indeed, creating a conducive environment would enhance and would drive
the national into a more ethical state with integrity.

In order to create the conducive environment for integrity, we should have continuous
education on integrity to every university students via ceaseless inculcation of ethical values
and norms among the university students. This is to initiate the shaping of correct values among
the university students at a level that the ethical values will be internalised before they step into

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the society. At long last, the noble values of integrity will become their second nature that
practising it as a way of life and society’s culture. Japan is a great example of continuous
education on integrity. In 2018, there were more than 73% of IDs lost were successfully
returned to their owners. Also, 83% of mobile phone lost and 65% of dropped wallets were got
to back with their owners while the other lost property which could not be returned to their
owners were destroyed by the police officers. Such phenomenon has shown how integrity as a
culture in Japan and studies shown that this might due to continuous education in upholding
moral values since young age (Park and Airth, 2020). Not to mention, they tend to scold on
misbehaved children and always put their sight on others’ behaviours in practicing ethics. Thus,
Japan is a good paragon for Malaysia to exemplify and learn from.

Apart from that, university students who pursuing professional programs, such as
engineering, architecture, medicine, accountant, lawyer and so on, should also abide by
professional codes and ethics for professional bodies. They should attend ethics courses and
should be required to pass the professional tests in order to gain professional qualifications
before practicing in their professions. There are professional bodies, such as the Malaysian
Board of Architects, the Association of Chartered Accountants, the Malaysian Medical
Association, the Malaysian Bar Council, and the Malaysian Board of Engineer, have formed
professional code of ethics to monitor the adherence of professionals to ethical values. This
indeed could ensure the leading roles of Malaysia to be free from malpractices and unethical
behaviours, enhancing the un-corruption of our nation.

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 CONCLUSION

Malaysia as a developing country, is undeniable that there are major challenges in

strengthening ethics and integrity. Such weaknesses and challenges should be overcame and
managed effectively in order to build an advance nation with integrity. Every graduates and
university students are the assets of Malaysia in driving development of country. Our every
effort taken is part and parcel to establish an ethical society in Malaysia. However, we should
not just converge our attention on them to bear the responsibility in enhancing the integrity of
nation. The grassroots right up to the highest level of the society should also involve in
enhancing national integrity and practice ethical values habitually without exceptional excuses.
It will be the strongest strength for Malaysia to overcome all the shortcomings in shaping a
principled nation to drive towards becoming a developed nation with glory and prosperity.

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