A Method for Group Decision Making Involving Subjective Perceptions of Experts’ Judgement: A Case of Art Student Placement Process

Abstract

Evaluation of artistry mostly depends on subjective perceptions of experts. As a decision-making process, it involves imprecision and fuzziness, and it is difficult to justify the process. Most art programs’ admission process involves evaluation of the candidates’ pencil drawings and selecting students among competing candidates. Using a justifiable process is essential for the administrators of art programs. Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods provide convincing results for real-world problems involving imprecise and fuzzy data. In this study, a modified version of the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and TOPSIS methods are proposed for the art student placement process. Delphi technique is used for identifying the evaluation criteria and the FAHP method is used in obtaining the importance of criteria. Rankings of the candidate students are determined using the TOPSIS method. The resulting rank order of drawings is evaluated by the committee members for validating the performance of the proposed method.