Chapter 3 Evaluating multidimensional objects : the example of grades 1

We tried to show in Chapter 2 that “voting”, although being a familiar activity to almost everyone, raises many important and difficult questions that are closely connected to the subject of this book. Our main objective in this Chapter is similar. We all share the – more or less pleasant – experience of having received “grades” in order to evaluate our academic performances. The authors of this book spend part of their time evaluating the performance of students through grading several kinds of works, an activity that you may also be familiar with. The purpose of this Chapter is to build upon this shared experience. This will allow us to discuss, based on simple and familiar situations, what is meant by “evaluating a performance” and “aggregating evaluations”, both activities being central to MCDA. As with voting systems, there is much variance across countries in the way “education” is organised: curricula, grading scales, rules for aggregating grades and granting degrees, are seldom similar from place to place. This diversity is even increased by the fact that each “instructor” (a word that we shall use to mean the person in charge of evaluating students) has generally developed his own policy and habits. The authors of this book have studied in four different European countries (Belgium, France, Greece and Italy) and obtained degrees in different disciplines (Maths, Operational Research, Computer Science, Geology, Management, Physics) and in different Universities. We were not overly astonished to discover that the rules that governed the way our performances were assessed were quite different. We were perhaps more surprised to realise that although we all teach similar courses in comparable institutions, our “grading policies” were much different even after having accounted for the fact that these policies are partly contingent upon the rules governing our respective institutions. Such diversity might indicate that evaluating students is an activity that is perhaps more complex than it appears at first sight.