Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approaches for Service Quality Evaluation in Technical Education Setting: Case Study

Abstract

Quality and performance of an institute largely depends on faculty profile, academics, infrastructure and professional growth opportunities. If they are considered as inputs to the system then pass percentage, placement and extent of contribution towards academic fraternity (in terms of research publications, projects and industrial consultancy etc.) may be treated as outputs. The inputs and outputs interact in a complex manner and right combination of them determines overall quality level of the institute. The interrelationship among various inputs and outputs in this transformation system is really difficult to understand clearly. Moreover, there is no specific guideline for evaluation of institutional quality level. The present study defines quality as a multi-attribute estimate and aims to evaluate a unique quality index quantitatively. However, most of the attributes are qualitative rather than quantitative. Qualitative attributes can be analysed based on expert opinions. Respondents are asked to assign attribute values in terms of scaled response (generally in Likert Scale). Existing methodologies like AHP, Fuzzy logic, TOPSIS etc. are being utilised in order to tackle such types of qualitative data (or quantitative data converted to linguistic terms). The shortcoming of these approaches is that these methodologies are based on human judgment which may lead to erroneous result. On the contrary DEA method is capable of handing quantitative data but the process is very lengthy to apply, in order to calculate technical efficiency. It is, therefore, felt necessary to search a robust methodology by which quantitative data can be explored efficiently and multi-attribute quality indices can be quantified and finally be converted into a single comprehensive quality index. If it is achieved the decision making process would become very easy for selection, comparison or benchmarking of service sectors according to their quality. In order to ease the decision making process encountered in such a multi attribute decision making situation, two multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques viz., grey relational analysis and VIKOR method have been used and results there of have been compared through a case study of service quality evaluation and benchmarking of technical institutes in Eastern part of India. The comparison process based on overall quality or performance index proposed in this work enables for benchmarking of the institutes and identifies areas which require attention for improvement of overall institutional quality. The application feasibility of proposed methods has been illustrated with the help of a case study. The proposed performance index is helpful for selection of an institute for various academic purposes.