Developed under the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2015-2025 for Higher Education, SETARA employs a rigorous assessment methodology to rate an education institution’s three core functions, namely teaching, research and services. Although measured against the same performance metric, each of the three categories have their own weightage so that their diversity, as well as unique strengths and challenges specific to their niche are fairly represented.

The last rating exercise was completed in 2017 involving institutions of university and university college status, which performance are rated and weighted as follows:

• Mature universities: Universities which are over 15 years old.
• Emerging universities: Universities which have been established within the last 15 years.
• University colleges: Institutions with university college status regardless of their history.

Malaysian Quality Evaluation System or MyQUEST is an instrument developed by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education in 2009 to evaluate the performance of Private Colleges in Malaysia.

Designed to encourage quality improvements among the colleges, MyQUEST looks into 5 core quality assessment criteria, which consist of:

1. Student Profile
2. Program Recognition
3. Graduate Recognition
4. Quality of Resources
5. Soundness of Governance

Colleges are categorized into 3 categories:

• Large: Student enrolment more than 2000
• Medium: Student enrolment between 601-1999
• Small: Student enrolment less than 600