A Decision-Making Approach for Ranking Tertiary Institutions’ Service Quality Using Fuzzy MCDM and Extended HiEdQUAL Model
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Hindawi
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(eattainment of excellence in institutions is maintained through the institutions’ adherence to its core values and efficient service
delivery. (ese factors are very important in facilitating global development of a country and determining the world ranking of an
institution. To this effect, this study presents an effective approach for evaluating and ranking quality of services in a higher
institution, taking four higher institutions in Nigeria as case studies. Service quality consists of different attributes and many of
them are intangible and difficult to measure, which means that using the previously known measurement approach will be
insufficient. (erefore, a fuzzy method was proposed to resolve the ambiguity of the concepts and intra-uncertainty, which are
associated with human judgments in decision-making. (is study adopted a contextualized service quality model for educational
domain called HiEdQUAL with some extended criteria in order to evaluate the perception of service quality by respondents from
the selected higher institutions: two private universities and two public universities from the south-west region of Nigeria. Four
Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods: TOPSIS, Yager’s min-max, Compensatory AND, and Ordered Weighted
Averaging are applied to comparatively evaluate the quality of services in the four higher institutions. (e MCDM methods are
engaged independently to validate the reliability of the ranking results. (e importance weight of each performance criterion is
found with Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) algorithm. (is study has been able to practically establish Ext-
HiEdQUAL as a new service quality model for higher education with six concepts and 33 criteria. (e output of the Fuzzy MCDM
ranking recommends institution B as the best institution to students based on the Ext-HiEdQUAL measures. Also, findings from
the sensitivity analysis showed that Yager’s min-max outperform the other investigated methods in this study by being consistent
and exceptionally tolerant in most instances when there is significant deviation in criteria weights.
Keywords
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science