AHP-RAPS Approach for Evaluating the Productivity of Engineering Departments at a Public University

Abstract

Education is an essential component for nations preparing to take advantage of the opportunities and confront the challenges of the 21st century. Universities, colleges, and research centers must work effectively and efficiently to achieve maximum results. In order to provide a comparable and verifiable evaluation of such institutions’ efforts, administrators need to adopt measurement tools such as those offered by multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM). The use of MCDM to solve complex real-world problems in the educational sector has dramatically increased in the past decade. This paper ranked the Engineering departments in a public university from 2019 to 2021 using combined MCDM methods between Analytical Hierarchy Analysis (AHP) and Ranking Alternatives by Perimeter Similarity (RAPS). The AHP technique assisted in the weighting for each evaluation criterion covered in this study. The RAPS technique assisted in ranking the Engineering departments using weights derived from the AHP technique. For the first time, the use of RAPS in the educational sector is presented in this paper. The findings revealed some of the departments under investigation’s vulnerabilities, indicating that they require assistance from the institution’s administration. Moreover, the results demonstrate that combining the AHP and RAPS techniques to evaluate and rank university departments is a successful method.

Keywords

• multi-criteria decision making
• analytical hierarchy analysis
• ranking alternatives by perimeter similarity
• ranking methods