Track: Service Systems and Service Management

Abstract

The Higher Education Admissions Center (HEAC) was established in 2005 to receive and review and register all applications to Higher Education Institutes according to the advertised disciplines and the demanded requirements. Then the center will distribute the accepted students to their "best" selection according  their competitive score. The Competitive score is a linear weighing average of all subjects that the student in Oman is taken. However, the competitive score gives 60% weighting to average score of the subjects required by the program and 40% to the average score of all subjects . The competitive score may vary for the same student from one program to another based on his/her obtained marks in the subjects required for the program (specialization). The students can then select up to 40 choices of programs offered.  They should rank the programs based on his/her preferences where the first choice should be the program they prefer the most and so on. Finally, admission offers will be made to a (limited) number of applicants who are on the top of the list for the program based on their competitive scores. if a student could not got his first choice then the system will try the second then the third and so on.

            In this paper, we try to improve the admission system proposed by the HEAC by applying the decision analysis bases which are (1) alternatives , (2) preferences and (3) information. The decision maker is the student and the alternatives are the offered programs. Whereas the preferences are the ranking list and the information is previous year statistics. We emphasize that the competitive scoring increase the ambiguity of the decision and make it difficult to the students to prepare their selection list.  In addition, competitive score is unperceptive compared to the average sum of the all subjects. and we also show that the competitive score formula is based on "unclear" basis. Finaly we propose certain recommendation based on the analysis to improve the system and lead the student to better selection mechanism.