A Fuzzy Expert System for Evaluating University Teaching Efficiency

Student evaluations of university efficiency are compulsory for universities. The Italian Ministry of University and Scientific and Technological Research proposed a questionnaire with items based on the four-point Likert scale and a traditional item-by-item analysis for the evaluation of teaching staff activity. In this study, three split-ballot experiments were carried out to test the differences between the four-point and five-point Likert scale. Furthermore, the traditional analysis was compared with the results of the fuzzy expert system set up to achieve the same purpose. The fuzzy expert system yielded scores that proved to be generally higher but sometimes also lower than those obtained using the five/four-point Likert scale