UI-PHINMA management responds to ‘anti-student policy’ claim
The administration of the University of Iloilo-PHINMA Education Network has denied issuing a memorandum that directed giving an automatic incomplete grade to students who have failed to settle their accounts, and that required a payment of P150 per subject for reprocessing of grades as claimed by the Student Council Alliance of the Philippines.
“UI-PHINMA did not release any memo,” the school said in a press statement yesterday.
However, the SCAP in a press release dated November 4 quoted Kaiser Cordero, a member of the UI Political Science Society, as saying that “the memo was never circulated well among the studentry and thus caught the students by surprise.”
The same press statement is also posted in SCAP’s official web blog “The Allegiance” until yesterday.
According to SCAP, such memorandum “adds extra fees for students in paying P150 per subject for the reprocessing of their grades. An average student takes seven subjects per semester.”
The group also said the Political Science Society, its sister organization within UI, “called for a dialogue between the students and the school management” and is “launching a signature campaign calling for a suspension of the memo.”
The UI-based organization also called for the Commission on Higher Education to intervene to protect students’ rights, the SCAP added.
Joey Limson, Iloilo coordinator of SCAP, said such “policy is clearly anti-student borne out of a capitalist venture within a welfare service.”
“Education is a welfare service and business interests should be relegated under the public interest,” Limson said.
Moreover, Cordero said their teachers can’t encode their grades because the school administration “had the system blocked.”
‘System Set’
In a press statement emailed by its marketing manager Jose A.D. de Luna, UI-PHINMA said its “system has been set, for administrative purposes, to identify which students have fully settled their accounts, and which ones have not.”
As such, the “system indicates ‘Grades Withheld’ when the student has not fully paid his/her account, and does not allow teachers/deans to input the grades in the system. However, the grades are already available and may be provided by the deans upon student’s request.”
It added that “as soon as the student’s account is fully settled, the school registrar unlocks the system and teachers/deans can input the grades. So from ‘Grades Withheld,’ the system will now indicate the student’s actual grades.”
“There are no additional fees required to change grades from ‘Grades Withheld’ to the actual grade when students settle their accounts,” it added.
Completion Fee
U-PHINMA said that “during instances when the student still has academic deficiencies (lacking course requirements) by the time grades are encoded, the student’s grade that is generated by the system is INC,” referring to incomplete.
“To remedy (this), the student is asked to submit the lacking requirement and pay a completion fee to change the grade from INC to actual grade, as has been standard practice even prior to PHINMA management,” it added.
Moreover, “(a) student is charged a completion fee of P150 to get his/her actual grade, only if he/she still lacks course requirements during encoding of grades. An example of this is, if a student fails to submit a term paper before scheduled encoding of grades.”*
