Assessment and Decision-Making in Universities: Analytics of the Administration-Staff Compromises
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Various processes in academic organizations include the decision points where selecting people through their assessment and ranking is performed, and the impact of wrong or right choices can be very high. How do we simultaneously ensure that these selection decisions are well balanced, fair, and unbiased by satisfying the key stakeholders' wishes? How much and what kinds of evidence must be used to make them? How can both the evidence and the procedures be made transparent and unambitious for everyone? In this paper, we suggest a set of so-called deep evidence-based analytics, which is applied on top of the collective awareness platform (portal for managing higher education processes). The deep evidence, in addition to the facts about the individual academic achievements of personnel, includes the evidence about individual rewards. However, what is more important is that such evidence also includes explicit individual value systems (formalized personal preferences in the self-assessment of both achievements and the rewards). We provide formalized procedures that can be used to drive the academic assessment and selection processes within universities based on advanced (deep) evidence and with different balances of decision power between administrations and personnel. We also show how this analytics enables computational evidence for some abstract properties of an academic organization related to its organizational culture, such as organizational democracy, justice, and work passion. We present the analytics together with examples of its actual use within Ukrainian higher education at the Trust portal.
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