On the Impact of Weighting Schemes on Alternatives’ Evaluation

Performance evaluation is ubiquitous nowadays. A fundamental approach to assessing alternatives (e.g., students, employees, universities, countries) involves weighting criteria to calculate their final scores. Determining these weights is crucial, especially when alternatives are evaluated individually and without comparison with others. In such cases, achieving consensus on weights among evaluators is vital for fairness. In the context of students’ evaluation from a university course, this initial study analyzes whether different weight assignments significantly alter final scores and identifies which of those assignments lead to the highest scores. The data consists of 53 students across seven assignments, and a bootstrap analysis is performed for validation. Results indicate statistically significant score variations compared to predetermined weights, with the ’Sum of Ranks’ approach resulting in the highest scores over 90% of the time. This highlights the importance of weighting schemes and recommends the use of bootstrapping to justify their selection.