ACADEA – A decision support system for faculty performance reviews

ACADEA, a multi-criteria decision support system for the performance review of individual faculty, is presented. Developed from the point of view of a department that is facing exogenously as well as self imposed objectives, the support system looks upon the aggregate performance of an academic department as the result of individual faculty member's multi-criteria evaluations. Five objectives, research output, teaching output, external service, internal service and cost, are operationalized into criteria. The system is applied to a university department with 30 faculty members evaluated over a 3-year period. The results identify promotional candidates and reveal underlying problems in managerial consistency, departmental sub-groupings and the incentive structure. The outcomes of the support system are consistent with the position that equity in faculty governance does not necessarily imply equal loads on all tasks.