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A hesitant fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making method for college applicants’ learning potential evaluation

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Abstract

The evaluation of applicants’ learning potential is important to college admission process. This paper develops a multi-criteria decision making method for a comprehensive evaluation of high school graduates’ learning potential in college, in which both entrance examination marks and expert remarks are considered in the indicator system. Experts’ opinions towards indicator importance are expressed by hesitant fuzzy numbers. By using hesitant fuzzy linguistic judgments, the flexibility of expressions is increased. A minimized divergence and hesitant degree model is established to calculate the experts’ weights. Then to determine indicators’ weights, a weighted average operator is applied. To aggregate the final evaluation results, a TOPSIS method is adopted. The proposed methodology is applied to evaluate students’ learning potential in one of the top universities in China. Ten years’ real enrollment data is collected in Business and Economic School. Based on the evaluation results, some suggestions are given for the admission process.

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Acknowledgments

We are thankful for the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71601134; 71872117; 71402108) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2017 M612983).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610064, People’s Republic of China

    Zongmin Li, Qi Zhang, Xinyu Du & Xiaoye Qian

  2. Decision Sciences Department, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Benjamin Lev

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  1. Zongmin Li
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  2. Qi Zhang
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  3. Xinyu Du
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  4. Xiaoye Qian
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  5. Benjamin Lev
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Correspondence to Xiaoye Qian.

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Li, Z., Zhang, Q., Du, X. et al. A hesitant fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making method for college applicants’ learning potential evaluation. J. of Data, Inf. and Manag. 1, 65–75 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42488-019-00006-x

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