An academic performance indicator using flexible multi-criteria methods

Abstract

Composite indicators are a very useful tool for conveying summary information on the overall performance of institutions and facilitating decision-making. Increasingly, there is a demand for indicators that allow performance to be assessed after the implementation of a strategy. This has several difficulties, and in this paper, we address three of them: how to evaluate at different points in time, how to estimate the weighting of the criteria and how to normalize the data. Our proposal is based on multicriteria techniques, using a recent method, uwTOPSIS, and is applied to data collected from 2975 students enrolled in the first year of science and engineering at the Industrial University of Santander (Colombia) from the first semester of 2016 to the first semester of 2019. In the paper, we show that our proposal makes it possible to measure and evaluate the academic performance of students at two points in time, and this allows the University to know whether its student support policy has been successful and to what degree it has been effective. Due to the large amount of data handled, data management has been done using R programming language, and model implementation has been done with Python.