Maintaining Quality: To Be or Not To Be

Quality Assurance is everyone’s business. The responsibility of maintaining and improving quality does not rest with the Quality Assurance Department only. Rather, it should be the concern of each department and study program.

Thus, to make sure that you deliver services with good qualities to our stakeholders—be it students, their parents, members of the Foundation, or simply guests dropping by to Ma Chung—you need a coordinator, whose main task is to coordinate a regular monitoring and self-evaluation of his or her own Directorate or Study Program. Conducted in the spirit of objectivity and high motivation for continuous improvement , the self-monitoring and evaluation should generate lists of things that need attention, problems that begin growing, and scheduled activities that need preparation. The awareness of this will in turn prompt efforts to solve the problems, to increase effectiveness or efficiency, and to gear up for incoming scheduled programs.


It is this conviction which encouraged me to stage Konvensi Penjaminan Mutu I (The First Convention of Quality Assurance) last Friday, 31 October 2008. At least, I seemed to be able to raise my colleagues’ awareness of the benefits of this convention: (1) they share with each other how their respective directorate or study program has been dealing with problems and striving to improve their qualities, (2) they are informed of whether some problems of another directorate concern their directorates or study program; (3) they see opportunities to strengthen the coordination between their own directorates and the others.


One day after the convention, I went through all Monitoring and Evaluation reports, giving each of them a few suggestions and comments for the next Monevin round, and then I sent back those reports to the directorates and study program.


I hope I have initiated a regular activity and event that will have a long-lasting positive impact on Ma Chung’s endeavour to deliver high-quality education.