The KPI marking system of USM is a modification of the Malaysian Research Assessment (MyRA) instrument of the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), which is mandatory for all public Universities but voluntary for private Universities in the country.

MyRA consists of 2 systems, MyRA-I and MyRA-II.  MyRA-I is for all Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in Malaysia, whereas MyRA-II is only for Research Universities (RU).  A Six-Star Rating system comes with MyRA-I.

MyRA has undergone several amendments since its inception in 2007.  Today, MyRA-I has 9 Sections, and marks are given for 8 of the Sections (Section B to I).  Marks for Sections B to E are capped at 200%, whereas for Sections F to I it is 100%. For MyRA-II, Sections D & E are joined to form a single Section D, and so there are only 8 Sections and marks are given for 7 of the Sections (Section B to H). Marks for Sections B to F are capped at 200%, whereas for Section G and H it is 100%.

Since MyRA-II is for RUs only, it is more difficult compared to MyRA-I, being more performance-centric (output) rather the process-centric (input).

For KPI-MS, both evaluation systems are used to evaluate PTJs, but some customizations have been made to the definitions (criteria), benchmarks and weightage of the instrument. For example, the benchmark and weightage for the criteria Publications, the definition for ‘Number of Citations’ has been changed from “100,000 per University” to “240 per PTJ”. The following are some important changes that affect the overall marking scheme for individual PTJs.

Section I, “Support facilities” has been changed to “Lab Accreditation”.  Previously Section I consisted of 2 subsections, ie; a) Lab Accreditation and b) Library Facilities, which carry 3 and 2 marks, respectively.  In KPI-MS2, item (b) has been deleted. However, for item (a) Non-S&T PTJs and the School of Mathematics have been exempted from this. This means that the total marks for Non-S&T PTJ is 95%, whereas for S&T PTJs it is 98%. The final marks for both groups will be normalized to 100% before the Star rating is computered.