A multi-criteria approach for the group assessment of an academic course: A case study

• The research proposes a methodology to evaluate the results of an academic course.
• Analytic hierarchy process is suggested to make group evaluations.
• Fuzzy numbers are used to describe the uncertainty of the expressed judgements.

The present paper aims at proposing a structured methodology to evaluate the results of an academic training course addressed to postgraduate students. The evaluation process intends to identify the efficacy of an education course by means of a comparison between the general objectives and the results expected by the students. Since the evaluated aspects by the students, detected by means of questionnaires, are both quantitative and qualitative, the proposed methodology is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In order to facilitate the evaluation process, answers have been modelled by means of linguistic variables. In particular, different evaluation scales have been used and each one is characterized by different levels associated to different fuzzy numbers.