In the pursuit and commitment to quality, the Quality Assurance Office (QAO) conducted a three-day Self-Assessment Report (SAR) writing workshop on June 20-22 through virtual conferencing.
The workshop entitled “What to and Not to”, highlighted pointers and insights on writing and analyzing SAR. It aimed to develop a SAR template that can be used by all colleges in their SAR writing.
Dir. Nina M. Cadiz, QAO Director and UPLB QA officer, emphasized in her welcome remarks the primary purposes of the workshop: to revisit previous SARs and to improve SAR writing by taking note of its contents and format.
A message from Dr. Jean O. Loyola, vice chancellor for academic affairs, provided updates on the administration’s initiatives for quality assurance (QA) endeavors and shared how UPLB is working hard on improvements toward a future-proof digital transformation through the Academic Management Information System (AMIS). She emphasized that QA is not just about the curriculum; the entire university is working together to align all systems to establish a QA culture in UPLB.
Day 1’s highlight was Dr. Ornsiri Cheunsuang’s sharing and insights on the key features of SAR, on writing an impressive SAR, and on qualities assessors look in a SAR. Dr. Cheunsuang is an associate professor at Chulalongkorn University and an AUN-QA lead assessor.
She stressed that the SAR should stand by UPLB’s mission and vision, and that every school or university should have a system to monitor all resources and a learning management platform where students can track their progress records since it is also an international standard requirement. Moreover, benchmarking should not be done only for checklist culture or to simply show data to the assessors; all collected data must be analyzed carefully for improvement.
At the end of her talk, Dr. Cheunsuang encouraged everyone not to look at QA as hard work because it will be internalized instinctively once everyone understands the nature of QA.
The workshop began on Day 2 as UPLB assessors Dr. Myra G. Borines and Dr. Tonette P. Laude presented the SAR template. Having finished AUN-QA Tier 1 Training, they guided the College Quality Assurance Officers (CQAOs) as they worked on standardized criteria 1 to 8 of the SAR. Each CQAOs was assigned a criterion to furnish, which was presented in Day 3.
Dir. Cadiz closed the workshop seminar by extending her deep gratitude and appreciation to the speaker and workshop facilitators.
CQAOs Dr. Adeliza A. Dorado of CAFS, Assoc. Prof. Rosemarie D. Eusebio of CAS, Dr. Edmund G. Centeno ofCDC, Assoc. Prof. Arlene C. Gutierez of CEM, Dr. Leila S. Africa of CHE, Dr. Marion Lux Y. Castro of CEAT, and Dr. Ariel L. Babierra of GS participated in the workshop.
Assoc. Prof. Eusebio, Dr. Africa, and Dr. Castro successfully moderated it. (JMDDelgado)