Tales of Promotions and Performance on the National Budget Circular (NBC) 461

The Higher Education Institution's professional promotion system is intended to govern the university administrators to ensure that the university's strategic directions and operations are in the hands of qualified faculty members. This paper Identified the narratives of the promotion and performance of the Sorsogon State University faculty throughout the implementation of the NBC 7A cycle for faculty assessment. This paper described the faculty evaluation experience and method, compared the institutional and zonal center evaluation findings, and determined the influence of research performance on the academic rank of faculty. It was found out that the assessment sparked concerns among faculty members, particularly with relation to the professional accomplishment criteria, where research publishing appeared to have an impact on faculty promotions. Although the NBC 461 cycle 7-A guidelines and evaluation instruments were utilized at both the institutional and zonal levels, only the zonal centers have a computerized system that stores the earned points of the faculty for re-evaluation at each cutoff cycle as a reference for the maximized criterion. This could explain the huge disparity between zonal and institutional evaluation findings. Local biases may be introduced by the halo effect, but not at the zonal level. Academic advancement does not depend just on research publishing, as the NBC 461 instrument considers various aspects of professional accomplishment in addition to research publication. Therefore, it is vital that the policies include robust support for faculty researchers, the establishment of research collaborations, the acquisition of external research grants, and a review of the incentive structure