Malaysian Qualifications Agency

Malaysian Qualifications Agency

Abbreviation	MQA
Type	Government Organisation
Legal status	Statutory body
Purpose	Educational accreditation
Headquarters	Petaling Jaya, Malaysia
Region served	Malaysia
CEO	Dato' Prof. Dr Rujhan Bin Mustafa
Parent organisation	Ministry of Higher Education
Website	www.mqa.gov.my

The Malaysian Qualifications Agency (Agensi Kelayakan Malaysia) or the MQA is a statutory body in Malaysia set up under the Malaysian Qualifications Act 2007 to accredit academic programs provided by educational institutions providing post secondary or higher education and facilitate the accreditation and articulation of qualifications.

The main role of the MQA is to implement the Malaysian Qualifications Framework (MQF) as a basis for quality assurance of higher education and as the reference point for the criteria and standards for national qualifications. Specifically, the functions of the MQA are:

The MQA also evaluates foreign qualifications and assesses it for equivalency with Malaysian secondary school and university preparatory qualifications.

The Education Act 1996 specifically excludes from its definition of educational institutions, schools or any other institutions where the teaching is confined exclusively to the teaching of any religion or any place declared by the Minister by notification in the Gazette not to be an educational institution. This allows for schools that provide religious instruction exclusively (like seminaries) to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the MQA.

Under Malaysian law, all institutions of higher education established by the federal government are deemed to be self-accrediting whereas no formal accreditation system for courses of study provided by privately owned (including those owned by state governments) existed until the passing of the series of education-related legislation in 1996.

The first university in Malaysia, the University of Malaya (UM), was a result of the union between the older King Edward VII College of Medicine (established in 1905) and Raffles College (established in 1928) with the passage of the University of Malaya Ordinance 1949. The ordinance empowered UM to confer diplomas and degrees in its own name, making it de jure self-accrediting institution. With the 1961 separation of the Kuala Lumpur campus and Singapore campus of UM into the University of Malaya and the University of Singapore respectively, the University of Malaya Act 1961 and the Degrees and Diplomas Acts 1962 re-affirmed the authority granted to under previous legislations to the newly re-organised UM.