Supervisory quality in Universiti Teknologi Mara: Supervisors' expectations towards quality supervision / Maryam Jameelah Hashim, Idris Osman and Joeaiza Juhari

In alignment with the Malaysian government goals and mission of the Vice Chancellor of
Universiti Teknologi MARA, Dato' Prof. Ir. Dr. Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar in upgrading UiTM
to be one of the research universities in Malaysia, the university must meet a few criteria. One
of it is producing a large quantity and quality of researcher including postgraduate students. In
order to achieve this surmountable task, the university encouraged for more research from
postgraduate students. However, some of these graduate students find difficulty in writing
research paper due to less structure in research direction and in making arrangements with
their supervisors. Therefore, this research aims are firstly to identify the relationship between
supervisors' attitude with supervisory quality and second, to identify the relationship between
supervisors' knowledge with supervisory quality. This study adopts quantitative research
approach (both supervising lecturers and practical students) of Universiti Teknologi MARA
Malaysia and the data were gathered through distributing questionnaires and personal
interviews. Sample size will be 680 respondents selected randomly from a few campuses.
Data collected will be analysed using the Regression Analysis Model in order to identify the
relationship of supervisors' expectations towards supervisory quality. Supervisory quality
performance was measured according to following aspects: Attitudes and Knowledge. The
outcome shows the existance of significant relationship between attitude and knowledge with
supervisory quality. It is hoped that once the supervisors have the information on the
supervising process, they are in a better position to develop skills to teach the postgraduate
students in writing a quality research which eventually will result in producing high profile
human capital and at the same time achieving the RU status.