SERVICE QUALITY IN EDUCATION: MANAGEMENT STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVE Ahmad Jusoh ,Siti Zaleha Omain, Dr. Norazman Abdul Majid, Ahmad Sharifuddin Shamsuddin, Associate Professor Dr. Hishamudin Md Som Faculty of Management and Human Resource Development University of Technology Malaysia Abstract According to some scholars, the strategic success of a service organization depends on its ability to consistently meet or exceed customer service expectations. This study thus set out measure the service quality performance of a faculty in a public university. Based on stratified random sampling on 229 students employing a survey instruments that measure six dimensions of quality attributes, the result of the study revealed that the level of service quality in this particular faculty is moderate. Analysis showed that there are significant differences based on the students’ perception of this faculty service quality by year of study and race. However, there are no significant differences based on gender. Implication and limitation of the study are highlighted and further research discussions are suggested. 1.0 Introduction The historic development of total quality or quality management was originally developed in the manufacturing sector. In the early part of the last century, this development was led by the USA (Lagrosen, Roxana and Leitner, 2004).The development of quality management in the public and service sector is still considered new compared with manufacturing sector. It just started in 1990s (Vinzant and Vinzant, 1996). In recent years, numerous studies have shown several examples of the successful use of systematic quality management in several public services (Lagrosen, 1999, 2000). However in the area of higher education, the adoption of quality control concept and practice can not be implemented directly because of the nature of the business in education and educational process it self. The culture of the universities which hold the exercise of academic freedom and individual autonomy are difficult to combine with the teamwork culture which is pertinent in quality management approach (Boaden and Dale, 1992; Colling and Harvey, 1995; Srikanthan and Dalrymple, 2003). In order to define quality in the right perspective, it is vital to study the meaning of quality in the situation that is under study (Lagrosen et.al., 2004). In complement to that, we must have strong basis and understanding on the development of quality thought in other disciplines too because it will help us to conceptualize the issue holistically, to compare the dimensions of quality that have been developed in manufacturing and service sector and to do some adaptation accordingly. The quality’s gurus, experts and researchers have given various definitions on quality in particular areas i.e manufacturing of products and services. Garvin (1984) has classified the definition of quality into five major groups. Those were transcendent, product-based, user-based, manufacturing-based, or value-based. Others defined quality as fitness for use (Juran and Gryna, 1988), conformance to requirement (Crosby, 1979), conformance to specification (Gilmore. 1974), meeting and/or exceeding customers’ expectation (Parasuraman , Zeithaml and Berry, 1985), performance over expectation (Besterfield, 1999), zero defect (Crosby, 1979), 1 brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by UUM Repository