Title: Postgraduate Students’ Readiness in Basic Competencies for Sustainable Quality Education
Abstract: Today the provision of sustainable quality education at all levels requires the acquisition of 21st-century skills of critical reading, writing, numeracy, media and technology literacy.This becomes more critical when pursuing a postgraduate degree as one must sieve through volumes of literature.Studies have indicated that attrition and failure of postgraduate students to graduate on time have become issues of grave concern in most countries including Malaysia.Scholarly studies have attributed this failure to several reasons including the lack of postgraduate students' readiness for postgraduate study in terms of their basic competency skills required to undertake empirical investigations.Therefore, the aim of this paper was to examine postgraduate students' basic competency skills with a focus on critical reading, academic writing and research skills.The study involved a total of 110 first-year postgraduate students in a private university in Malaysia.Data were collected via a three-pronged approach involving competency tests, a questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews.The findings revealed that there was a significant difference between students' perceived and actual performance in critical reading and research skills.Their academic writing also left much to be desired.These findings indicate that the assumption that students embarking on postgraduate study come well-equipped with basic competencies can no longer be ignored.Thus, it is pertinent that initiatives need to be put in place to address postgraduate students' basic competencies so that more sustainable quality education can be provided at the postgraduate level.