How we decide · Rumah Kediaman Siswa

What need actually means

Two households. Only one of these two readings finds the one under pressure.

Both send a student to UM. Read the income on its own and they rank one way. Read it against what each household has to cover every month and the order reverses. The second reading is the one the rubric uses.

The larger income

RM6,500

A month, supporting eight people. Two of them at university, three in school, one under six.

What that household needs a month

RM4,252

Nisbah

1.53

Marks on the first criterion, out of 30

14.6

The smaller income

RM4,800

A month, supporting three people. One of them at university.

What that household needs a month

RM2,240

Nisbah

2.14

Marks on the first criterion, out of 30

5.4

By income alone, RM6,500 sits above RM4,800 and that is the end of it. Against what each household has to cover, the first has about half again what eight people need and the second has more than twice what three people need. Same ringgit, very different room to spare. That is why RKS ranks on the ratio and why there is no income cut off anywhere in the rubric. Neither household is being judged for what it earns. One of them is simply closer to the edge, and an allocation of fifty beds has to be able to see which.

The measure we use instead

Income measured against what that household actually needs.

Lembaga Zakat Selangor publishes a table giving the monthly cost of each kind of household member: a working adult, a child in school, a dependant at university, someone registered OKU. Add up the people in a household and you get the minimum that household needs each month. Divide the household income by that figure and you get the nisbah. Below 1.00 means the household earns less than it needs. We did not invent those component figures and we cannot adjust them for anybody, which is exactly why they are the ones we use.

The published table is at zakatselangor.com.my. Every component we use is reprinted on the rubric page, and the calculator shows the sum line by line so you can add it up yourself.

The full component table

No cable, no exceptions

Six things that make a favour impossible to grant.

Everyone applying here has heard that these things run on who you know. So rather than promise that they do not, here is the machinery, and every part of it is something you can check from outside the committee.

The rubric is published before anyone applies

Version and date are printed on the rubric page and in the ledger, and it is frozen from the moment applications open until results are out. A band can only be moved before anybody can see who moving it would help.

Every mark comes off a document

Marks are read from what you uploaded with the form, not from what you said. A declaration a document does not support is dropped rather than argued about, so nobody scores higher for putting it more convincingly.

There is no discretionary mark anywhere

No bonus, no adjustment, no field where a committee member can add points at their own judgement. The six criteria add to 100 and there is no seventh. Nothing can be given to you and nothing can be taken off you.

The arithmetic is public and you can run it

The calculator on this site runs the same published bands the committee scores against. Put your own figures through it, keep the result, and compare it to the breakdown that arrives after results.

Run your own figures

The written answer cannot move your mark

It is read at shortlist to separate applicants sitting on the same score, and that is the whole of its power. It adds nothing and it subtracts nothing, so a good writer cannot climb past someone in more need.

Nobody can sell you a bed

Applying is free. There is no payment page on this site and there never will be. Rent is paid only after an offer and only through UM E-Pay. If anyone offers to arrange a place for you, for money or for a favour, they cannot, and we want to know who said it.

And if we still get a figure wrong

A rubric run by people is a rubric that can be mistyped. Every applicant gets 48 hours from the moment their result is sent to point at a figure that was entered or read wrongly, and if we misread a document the score is corrected and both lists are redrawn from the corrected score. That is a right you have, not a favour anyone grants.

How the correction window works

On results day

We publish the whole spread, not just the list of who got in.

A cut off nobody publishes is a cut off nobody can check. So when results go out, the distribution of every mark on both lists goes up on this site, and the result in your inbox tells you exactly where in that distribution you stood.

Published here, for anyone

The distribution of marks on each list, drawn in bands of ten
The cut off on each list, meaning the mark of the last applicant offered a place
The rubric version every one of those marks was scored against, unchanged since the day applications opened
Any correction made during the 48 hour window, and whether it moved either cut off

Sent only to you

Your total out of 100, and your mark on each of the six criteria
Your had kifayah in ringgit and your nisbah to two places, so you can repeat the sum
Which band of the published distribution your mark fell in, so the number means something

Whether you are offered a place or not. A one line rejection tells you nothing you can act on or check.

The page is already up

Empty, but built, so you can see exactly how your result will be shown before you are in the position of reading it. On results day the columns fill in, the cut off is drawn on both charts, and you can type your own mark to find where it sat.

See how the results will be published

What is never published, in any version of this

No names, no matric numbers and no faculties, on either list
Nobody's household income, household size, assistance status or documents
No individual's position in the ranking, and no list of scores one by one
Nothing that lets one applicant work out another applicant's circumstances

A band of ten marks is deliberately the least revealing form of this that still lets you check your own position. Much of what the form collects is sensitive personal data under the Act, and transparency about the method never becomes an excuse to publish somebody's circumstances.

What happens to what you submit

Where every figure comes from

Most of the rubric is somebody else's number, and the rest is ours.

Every threshold on the rubric either belongs to a body that publishes it or belongs to this committee. Both lists are below, because the second one is the part you are entitled to argue with.

Not ours. Published by somebody else and checkable

What a household of your composition needs each month

Lembaga Zakat Selangor, had kifayah 2023

Nine component figures, reprinted in full on the rubric page and added up line by line in the calculator.

The income bands on the second criterion

Jabatan Perangkaan Malaysia

The national household income deciles from the 2022 survey, used as published. RM2,560, RM3,440, RM4,310, RM5,250 and RM11,820 are their boundaries, not ours.

Confirmed assistance status

eKasih, JKM, zakat, STR

Each one already exists as a decision somebody else made about your household, and each one arrives as a slip, a letter or an approval you upload. We are reading their finding, not making our own.

OKU status and chronic illness

Kad OKU, hospital letter

Registration is JKM's, and a diagnosis is a doctor's. Nobody on this committee assesses either.

Flood or fire in the past twelve months

JKM or APM report

This is on the rubric only because it produces a numbered report. That is the same test every other criterion has to pass.

Rent, deposit and the payment date

JSEPP and the Perjanjian Sewaan

RM170 a month and an RM170 deposit are set by the University department, not by JKRKS, and the 25th is Klausa 4.2 of the agreement you sign. The committee cannot alter any of the three for anybody.

Ours, and we would rather say so

The six weights, meaning that the needs ratio is worth 30 and everything else is worth less
The money in hand bands on the third criterion, and the decision not to count what you earn yourself
The travel time bands, and the decision to cap them at two hours rather than rank by distance
The decision to rank on the ratio rather than on income, and to score need rather than merit

Those four are the committee's judgement and nobody else's. They are published in full before anyone applies, which is the only window in which arguing about them is fair to everybody. If you think one of them is wrong, say so now, through the Setiausaha or your house PIC, and say which figure and what you would put instead. A rubric that nobody is allowed to challenge is just a rule with better manners.

What we do not score

Three things that are not on the rubric, and why.

Each of these was left off for the same reason: it would have quietly measured something other than need, and always at the expense of the same people.

Leadership and campus involvement

A lot of the people who apply here are carrying real responsibility already, in a persatuan, a kelab or a faculty committee, and we know what that costs in a week. It is worth something, and it is not nothing to us that you do it.

It is not on the rubric because we cannot measure it evenly across everyone. A committee post is visible and a shift at a mamak until midnight is not, and a criterion that rewards the first would quietly mark down students working to send money home. These beds are directed at need, and that is the only thing the rubric reads.

Housing instability

No document can verify it. A student sleeping on a friend's floor and a student with a settled room produce exactly the same paperwork, so any mark we gave would rest on whichever of them wrote the more convincing sentence. That is not an assessment of need, it is an assessment of writing, and it would land hardest on the applicants we most want to reach.

Flood and fire stay on the rubric, because a JKM or APM report carries a number we can check.

Marks for the written answer

A mark out of ten for the essay measures writing, not need. The students who most need a bed are often the ones with least practice at explaining themselves in formal Malay or English, and that mark was quietly reading fluency instead.

The written answer still exists and it is still read, at the shortlist stage only. It breaks a tie between applicants sitting in the same score band. It adds no marks and it never subtracts any.

What a rubric cannot do

A fairer way of choosing does not make a single extra bed.

There are fewer beds than there are applicants, and most people who apply will not get one. Publishing the rubric does not change that. It changes only whether you can see how the decision was made and check it afterwards, which was the part we could fix this session. The number of beds is the part we are still working on.

What we are working on Housing help either way

The bed goes to whoever needs it most. Nothing else gets you one.