THE OFFICE of Student Activities (OSA) has temporarily halted the implementation of the Loyola Schools Performance Management System for Student Organizations (LS PMS for SO) this school year 2016-2017 to evaluate the current system and replace it fully by SY 2018-2019

The LS PMS for SO was instituted in SY 2007-2008 in a bid to mentor, measure, and evaluate the performance of accredited student organizations. In this effort, the office may both identify and implement appropriate interventions that may achieve the further growth and development of accredited student organizations. A student organization that is accredited means that it maintains the standards defined by this office.

In a memo to all student groups and organizations released on March 22, OSA Director Ralph Jacinto Quiblat said that the LS PMS for SO has not been evaluated for “best practices and areas for improvement” since its institution ten years ago.

In evidence, student leaders gave negative feedback about the current system in place.

“An evaluation and system appraisal is long overdue,” he concluded.

Review team

Quiblat enacted the PMS Review Team headed by Kevin Ace Lopez-Vito, the OSA Coordinator for Student Organizations Assessment and Review. The team will research, evaluate, develop, and implement a new system to replace the current one by SY 2018-2019.

“It is difficult to have the same standard [of evaluation] for all student organizations,” said Lopez-Vito. He explained that the university maintains a wide spectrum of organizations from nine clusters with different core competencies from one another.

He further added that organizations from the 1990s are from a different landscape altogether compared to what it is like today.

“Organizations right now are more empowered in that they are trying to send a reply to the problems that we have in society, “ he explained.

In this regard, he finds that the new system must have a wide array of components to evaluate the organizations.

However, he said that they must also be afforded a sense of individualism given the nature of their cluster and organization.

“You cannot box them to some aspect of evaluation marker just because that is what the organization does,” he explained.

According to Lopez-Vito, this process of assessment and review will be “difficult” because there is a need to firstly design the tool to evaluate the current system and secondly design yet another tool to evaluate the student organizations.

Timeline of events

Since January, the team has been making headway in gathering data from the student activities community through focus group discussions, surveys, and interviews.

To ensure the efficient handling of data and information, the team is working with the Organizations Strategies and Research Department from the Council of Organizations of the Ateneo.

Furthermore, the team will be benchmarking the current system with other universities both local and foreign.

The gathered data will then be analyzed from May to June. In the following months from July to June, the new system will be designed and tested. Thereafter, a consultation roadshow will be held from September to October to introduce the new system to an audience of administrators and students, who will then give their final feedback.

Finally, the beta implementation of the new system will begin in the second semester of SY 2017-2018.