Olivia Proffit
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The Cal Poly fraternity and sorority community is planning to implement a new online program called Standards of Excellence to track each chapter’s activity.
According to Coordinator of Fraternity and Sorority Life Kathryn O’Hagan, the new Standards of Excellence program will bring a better structure to the assessment of chapters.
“It’s just a way to evaluate and assess each chapter and each organization within a community to make sure we are meeting our goals and accomplishing things we say that we’re doing,” O’Hagan said.
In the past, the Standards of Excellence program has been an essay-based model. Chapters would send O’Hagan their own essays about how they were doing and what they were accomplishing. But that model wasn’t covering the full scope of the greek community’s activities, she said.
Influence for the new system came from other national chapters who have a similar structure.
“Looking at what other institutions were doing, we needed to step it up a bit,” O’Hagan said.
The new and more detailed model of the Standards of Excellence program will track tangible requirements such as community service hours, academics, leadership positions, chapter incentives and more.
“It’s not about following policy,” O’Hagan said. “It’s about showing the really amazing things they do as a chapter so we can provide opportunity for them to not only do those great things but set goals to do even better.”
The Standards of Excellence program is not meant to rank or compare the chapters to one another. Rather, it is focused on helping individual chapters grow, she said.
But the system has not been implemented yet.
Since spring, greek leadership has been creating the categories by which each chapter’s progress will be evaluated. This quarter has been focused on tweaking the draft.
Interfraternity Council (IFC) President and fourth year communications studies and kinesiology senior Alex Horncliff is involved in the process.
“The Standards of Excellence is going to improve infrastructure, give clear expectations and show how chapters are excelling and where the IFC board can improve its programming,” Horncliff said.
Considering the continual growth of the greek community, each chapter will likely create a Standards of Excellence committee to help manage the system on behalf of their chapter. There will be a chair position to track how the chapter is doing, O’Hagan said.
According to O’Hagan, the plan is for the revamped Standards of Excellence to be implemented by winter quarter.