Assessing the quality of brazilian undergraduate courses: a slack-based “Benefit of the doubt” composite indicator.

Abstract

The present work aims to evaluate the quality of undergraduate courses in Brazilian higher education institutions. The current methodology used by the Ministry of Education, Preliminary Course Concept (CPC), considers eight indicators and uses pre-established weights to obtain a continuous CPC value. The arbitrary definition of these weights is a significant problem in the current method. Thus, to mitigate this limitation and provide a fairer assessment for the courses, the present study proposes the construction of a composite indicator using a slack-based "benefit of the doubt" model. The construction of the approach is divided in two steps, first all courses are ranked and in a second moment, a tier procedure is used to group the courses. The management engineering courses evaluated in 2019 were used as an object of study to illustrate the procedure. The results show the applicability and relevance of the proposed method.