Student peer evaluations using the analytic hierarchy process method

Employment of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to assess the contributions of engineering student team members is described. The students perform this assessment as well as the instructor. The assessments are correlated with the individual team role assignments to making a final determination of the contribution of the individual to the team effort. Using this evaluation technique appears to provide candid student peer input for evaluations. AHP can be characterized as a multi-criteria decision technique in which qualitative factors are of prime of importance. A model of the problem is developed using a hierarchical representation. At the top of the hierarchy is the overall goal or prime objective one is seeking to fulfil. The succeeding lower levels then represent the progressive decomposition of the problem. The knowledgeable parties complete a pair-wise comparison of all entries in each level relative to each of the entries in the next higher level of the hierarchy. The composition of these judgments fixes the relative priority of the entities at the lowest level relative to achieving the top-most objective. A description of AHP for teams within a production engineering class is described. First, the lack of success with traditional student questionnaires to assess team performance is described, followed by a description of what appear to be more meaningful results when AHP is used. Finally, several complicating factors associated with this experiment, some tentative conclusions and a recommendation for continued investigation of the use of AHP for student evaluations are described.