Faculty evaluation using multicriteria value measurement

Despite a growing interest on performance appraisal of faculty, only a few reported studies propose models that cover the full range of academic activities and models at use are typically based on ad hoc scoring systems that lack theoretical soundness. This article approaches faculty evaluation from an innovative comprehensive perspective. Based on concepts and methods of multiple criteria value measurement, it proposes a new faculty evaluation model that addresses the whole range of academic activities and can be applied within and across distinct scientific areas, while respecting their specificities. This paper proposes a two-level hierarchical additive value model, with the areas of activity at the first level and the evaluation criteria at a second level. Each evaluation criterion integrates quantitative and qualitative components of an academic activity. To compute an overall value score for each faculty member, an optimization procedure is used to guarantee for each faculty member the maximum overall value score that can be attained with the interval weights defined and for her or his multicriteria area profile. The proposed model was designed, within the legal and institutional context of the Portuguese universities, to be used by Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon.