Title: Quality indicators of engineering education programmes: a multi-criteria analysis from India

Authors: K.G. Viswanadhan

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, NSS College of Engineering, Palakkad, Kerala 678 008, India

Abstract: There has been a steep increase in the growth of technical educational institutions in India in the last two decades. This unprecedented growth obviously led to several problems with regard to the quality of technical education. While everyone concerned with engineering education agrees that achieving quality in education is a worthy undertaking, there is no agreement on the definition of quality, let alone how to measure or achieve it. An attempt has been made in this paper to identify the |Indicators of Quality| and to prioritise the importance of these indicators in assessing the performance of an undergraduate engineering programme. The study includes multi-criteria, multilevel decision making based on the subjective opinions of the respondents. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a powerful tool for such a situation, has been utilised for the study.

Keywords: quality indicators; quality assessment; AHP; analytical hierarchy process; engineering programmes; India; engineering education; education goals; undergraduate engineering; higher education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2009.023542

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2009 Vol.4 No.3, pp.270 - 282

Published online: 27 Feb 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article