In today’s modern world, universities are competing to improve their competitiveness worldwide. It is usually indicated by ranking systems. A number of ranking systems also vary depending on the evaluated aspects. In Indonesia, a university ranking system is often associated with the accreditation ensuring the quality of education. A rapid quality education improvement is appropriately implemented in public universities. However, this will bring more challenges for private universities as they are usually possessing limited resources. Accordingly, an effective decision-making system should be proposed, especially to assist private university achieving their goals. This study aims to evaluate academic departments in terms of research output in a university using the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. To develop the model, a case study in an Indonesian private university with 16 undergraduate programs was demonstrated. The ANP method is selected to construct a hierarchical structure and to obtain the weights of the criteria. Then, a comparative study is conducted applying fuzzy TOPSIS, fuzzy SAW, and fuzzy EDAS to rank the departments. In this study, six criteria were identified, while the greatest weight was the citation criterion. Besides, these three methods also presented consistent ranks for the best and the worst performing departments. Practically, the results can later be adopted by the decision-makers (DMs) in the university to determine the priority-based strategies to accelerate improvements for the quality of education subject to limited resources.       

Keywords

Education, university evaluation, MCDM, sensitivity analysis