A decision support system for the assessment of higher education degrees in Portugal

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2003

Authors

José Paulo Santos (Author) Other; José Fernando Oliveira (Author) FEUP; Maria Antónia Carravilla (Author) FEUP; Carlos Costa (Author) FEUP

Conference proceedings International

Title: Global engineer: education and training for mobility

Pages: 23-28

31st SEFI Conference (SEFI 2003)

Porto, Portugal, 7 a 10 de setembro de 2003

Other information

Abstract (EN): The Foundation of Portuguese Universities (FUP) is a private institution of public interest, created in 1993 and subscribed both by Public Universities and the Catholic Portuguese University, all of them members of the Council of the Portuguese Universities Rectors (CRUP). The assessment of higher education degrees in Portugal is coordinated by FUP. The degrees are grouped by scientific areas and for each area an evaluation panel is designated. The evaluation panels are composed by representatives of the Portuguese universities and by representatives of independent institutions. The task of the evaluation panels is the assessment of the degrees belonging to a scientific area, considering, on the one hand, the self-evaluation reports presented by each school and, on the other hand, a 2 or 3-day visit to the degree site. The assessment is accomplished considering several pre-defined criteria. Recently, the results of the assessment of higher education in Portugal started to be expressed in a quantitative way, complementing the qualitative valuation. A first phase of this process intended to obtain, for each group of degrees, assessed by the same evaluation panel, a rating for each evaluation criterion. In a second phase, after the definition of a methodology to weight each one of the evaluation criteria, an absolute ranking of the degrees belonging to a certain scientific area may be obtained. We will present a first approach to a Decision Support System (DSS) that intended to help the Foundation of the Portuguese Universities in the task of managing part of the process. The prototype of this DSS was built on an Excel sheet -- using VBA -- and it incorporates a methodology to obtain the rating of the degrees for each criterion.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 6