The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ Overseas Scholarship Program: Targeting Quality and Employment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to fill the void in academic literature concerning the transition from the King AbdullahScholarship Program (KASP) to the current Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ Overseas Scholarship Program.Based on a review of published news accounts and of announcements made by Saudi sources, Saudi officialdocuments and comments from various international sources presented in chronological order, this paper suggeststhat there have been three phases in this transition, from 2015 to the present, namely: Phase One (Uncertainty); PhaseTwo (Establishment of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ Overseas Scholarship Program); Phase Three (TheQuality Issue). Saudi Arabia is going through particularly challenging times in the globalized knowledge society andeconomy; this paper encourages the academic community to focus on the moves now being made by the Kingdom toaddress the quality issue within its educational system, bearing in mind the comments of Majlis Ash-Shura memberHuda Al Helaissi when interviewed by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica: “You must give us time: we are ayoung nation… above all, we Saudis are not like you Westerners: we have different values and we intend to upholdthem. We will change in our own way, not yours”.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".