Evaluating research students' satisfaction based on supervisors' characteristics: A fuzzy approach

In the perspective of growing demand for research accountability, every university is making it an objective to achieve optimum performance in terms of research and development. Successful completion of research depends on the kind of supervision received by students from their supervisors. As students' satisfaction directly affects the quality of research at the university level, there is an urgent need of an explicit system that evaluates students' satisfaction with their supervisors. This paper aims to examine the experiences and challenges of post graduate research students with their supervisors. For this, data were collected through face-to-face interviews and a questionnaire aimed at recording response from 100 post graduate students of a private university in north India. From the study we identified relevant parameters like supervisor's expertise, active listening, availability and self seeking behavior etc. As these parameters are imprecise and difficult to measure directly, these can be expressed in fuzzy context. A fuzzy based approach is used to propose a system that measures the overall student's satisfaction.