XIII CLAIO Congreso Latino-Iberoamericano de Investigación Operativa USING THE ELECTRE TRI METHOD FOR SORTING THE PERFORMANCE OF UNIVERSITIES André Luís Policani Freitas  Sidilene Gonçalves Rodrigues* * LEPROD/Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense, Campos dos Goytacazes/RJ/Brasil Abstract In the last years, the Brazilian University System has experienced a fast growth, which is characterized by the increasing quantity of Universities and University Degree Courses. In this context, it’s essential that the Education System is able to train determined and competent professionals. One of the ways to get the Education System efficiency consists of the continuous evaluation of the performance of the Universities concerning several criteria. In order to contribute to the treatment of this problem, this article proposes the use of a Multiple Criteria Decision Aid method (the ELECTRE TRI method, Yu (1992)) to sort the performance of Universities considering the perspective of professors – which can be considered as an university self evaluation process and a multiple evaluator sorting problem. After conducting an experiment, the results are presented and some considerations are done. Key words: multicriteria, multi-evaluators, self evaluation, universities, ELECTRE 1. INTRODUCTION In the last years, the Brazilian University System has experienced a fast growth, which is characterized by the increasing quantity of Universities and University Degree Courses. In this context, it’s essential that the Education System is able to train determined and competent professionals. One of the ways to get the Education System efficiency consists of the continuous evaluation of the performance of the Universities concerning several criteria. In order to contribute to the treatment of this problem, this work proposes the use of a Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) method (the ELECTRE TRI method, Yu (1992)) to sort the performance of Universities considering the perspective of professors – which can be considered as an university self evaluation process and a multiple evaluators sorting problem. Considering a set E = {E 1 , E 2 ,..., E r } of evaluators, the multiple evaluators sorting problem can be introduced as a multiple criteria decision problem in which every evaluator E i should evaluate the performances of an object (university) a k concerning a finite set F ={g 1 , ..., g n } of criteria. By using some assignment rules/procedures, the object performance in the viewpoint of each evaluator should be assigned to one of the predefined categories (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Multi-evaluators sorting problem  Av. Alberto Lamego, 2000 - Horto - Campos dos Goytacazes/RJ/Brasil - <policani@uenf.br, sidilene@uenf.br> OBJECT C 1 C 2 C 3 ... C t Criterion 2 Criterion n ... Criterion 2 Evaluator 1 Evaluator 2 Evaluator r ?