Determining student activities via compromised-analytic hierarchy process and 0-1 integer programming to maximize setara points and satisfy chickering theory

Abstract

Prioritizing and making decisions on what student activities to be selected and conducted to fulfill the aspiration of a university requires some understanding on the mission of the university as translated in its strategic plan and the basic theory on student development. For government funded universities in Malaysia, the recent budget cut imposed by the Malaysian government has made the task more difficult. In this paper, we illustrated how 0-1 integer programming (0-1 IP) model was implemented to select which activities among the forty activities proposed by the student body of Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) to be implemented for the 2017/2018 academic year. Two different models were constructed. The 0-1 IP model was developed to determine which activities to be selected based on RM50,000 total budget allocated by the UUM management towards fulfilling the SETARA-rating requirements as well as the Chickering's student development theory. The selection of activities was also based on maximizing the preference of the members of the student body whereby the preference value for each activity was determined using Compromised-Analytic Hierarchy Process. The optimal result obtained using LINGO version 11 revealed that the budget allocated was more than enough to fulfill all the needed requirements. The technique used in this study will be useful and suitable to be implemented by organizations with key performance indicator-oriented programs and having limited budget allocation issues.