Debmallya Chatterjee* et al. / (IJITR) INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY AND RESEARCH Volume No. 1, Issue No. 4, June - July 2013, 283 - 291. ISSN 2320 –5547 @ 2013 http://www.ijitr.com All rights Reserved. Page | 283 A Study on The Comparison of AHP And Fuzzy AHP Evaluations of Private Technical Institutions in India DEBMALLYA CHATTERJEE Research-Scholer, Department of Applied Mathematics, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India BANI MUKHERJEE Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, Jharkhand, India Abstract - The numbers of private technical institutions in India are increasing rapidly in the recent decade. Today there are thousands of private self-financed technical institutions most of which are compromising with their quality of education. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and its fuzzy extension (FAHP) are two of the efficient tools by which one can evaluate such institutions. There are ample numbers of studies in literature that discussed the efficiencies of the AHP and FAHP separately. This present piece of work makes an attempt to study and quantify the difference, if any in the applications of AHP and FAHP on the evaluation of self-financed private technical institutions in India. Key words: Analytical hierarchy process, Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process, technical institutions, comparative study. I. INTRODUCTION: Technical education in India plays a vital role in the development of any nation. It not only includes engineering education but also contributes in the developmental activities of the nation. Since the era of liberalization, globalization and privatization, there has been a significant changein the field of technical education in India [12]. The growth is significant and can be seen from the Figure 1. Figure 1: Growth of technical institutions (2007-2012) Source: Report of the working group 2011-12, Dept. of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development, India. Out of numerous of private self-financing technical institutions that have emerged, a few are offering quality education but many of them are compromising with the quality. The stakeholders are confused in selecting a quality institution for their career development and prosperity. Because of low quality institutions the graduated student has become a suspect. This phenomenon raises the important question: how to select a quality institution? The importance of using a tool like AHP or FAHP in multi criteria decision making like evaluation of technical institutions in India has been the illustrated in many studies done by the researchers across different field where they talked about capturing tangible and intangible factors as well ([2]; [5]; [7]; [8]; [9]; [10]; [11]; [13]). Interestinglythe researchers in most of their study involving FAHP opinioned that embedding fuzzy mathematics with the classical AHP helped capture the vagueness of human decision making and provided better precision ([1]; [6]; [14]). However no existing study illustrated the difference by quantifying it through the application of AHP and FAHP on the same problem. The following sections of this paper makes an attempt to demonstrate the detailed comparison between the results i.e. convergence and non- convergence in terms of the factor weights, sub factor weights and alternative scores obtained in the evaluation of private self-financed technical institutions using AHP and FAHP respectively. An attempt is also made to find the statistical significance of the correlation between the results obtained using the two different methods. II. METHODOLOGY A. Selection of respondents for the study The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and its fuzzy extension (FAHP) are both capable of handling a mixture of subjective and objective feedbacks and because of this character requires consistent inputs for efficacy. This character of both AHP and FAHP invites ‘expert opinion’ for consistent evaluations of the factor weight. In this study twelve experts were selected from academia having more than fifteen years’ experience in the field of engineering education and were associated with all the three technical institutions of Durgapur for some time in their career. Mostly the