News | C.J. Palpal-latoc
University of the Philippines-Manila (UPM) students are calling for the abolition of the online Student Academic Information System or SAIS following server crashes.
The SAIS website used for students’ enrollment started crashing reportedly at around 1PM on Friday, January 4, when the pre-enlistment of subjects was opened. In the succeeding hours, students suffered from different website errors such as suddenly being logged out of one’s account or being refused access to an account in spite of giving the correct email or password.
Students quickly took online to call for the scrapping of SAIS, making #JunkSAIS a trending topic on Twitter. The UPM University Student Council has already started a petition to junk SAIS and to bring back homegrown systems like what UP Diliman students use such as the Computerized Registration System (CRS).
Website crashes or errors have been reported during enrollment periods since the implementation of SAIS in UPM in 2014, prompting students to question the efficiency of the system and call for the scrapping of SAIS and its mother project eUP — a 752 million-peso partnership-program with SMART Communications, Inc. spearheaded by then-UP President Alfredo E. Pascual.
Other campuses such as UP Los Baños (UPLB) also suffered from technical incompetencies of SAIS. In 2016, news site Rappler reported that more than 500 UPLB students camped out to enlist subjects and more than 800 skipped the first day of classes to protest against SAIS and eUP.
Public health freshie Mikaela San Ramon said that SAIS should be scrapped because it is inefficient and time-consuming. “[SAIS] rarely does its job right,” she declared.
Nicole Torres, also a public health freshie, lamented that they skipped meals just to ensure that their SAIS accounts were working. “It was a bad experience as a freshie and a first-timer,” she said.
Local science group Agham Youth UPM said that UP should have just supported tried and tested homegrown systems such as CRS or SystemOne for expansion and upgrade instead of allotting hundreds of millions on what turned out to be a failure.
“SAIS merely benefited the private contractors involved in the project to the detriment of students,” it said.
The UPM Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs has rescheduled the online pre-enlistment to January 7 at 9AM, slating enlistment data for reset as advised by the University Registrar. #
