Construction of Quality Indicators Based on Pre-Established Goals: Application to a Colombian Public University

This study creates indicators of adequacy and excellence based on multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods and fuzzy logic. The calculation of indicators presents two main difficulties: The nature of the data (numerical, interval, and linguistic values are mixed) and the objective of each criterion (which does not have to reach either the maximum or the minimum). A method is proposed, based on similarity measures with predetermined ideals, that is capable of overcoming these difficulties to provide easy-to-interpret information about the quality of the alternatives. To illustrate the usefulness of this proposed method, it has been applied to data collected from students across nine semesters at the Bucaramanga campus of the Industrial University of Santander in Colombia. This case study demonstrates that the proposed method can facilitate strategic decisions at an institution and open the way for the establishment of action policies regarding gender inequality and economic disparity, among other things.