Data Envelopment Analysis

Executive Summary

Our goal for this project was to evaluate WPI students by their academic and sleep habits and understand the correlation to their academic achievement and personal satisfaction. We chose this topic because we are students of WPI and therefore we wanted to understand how our fellow students’ habits affect their grades and happiness level. We surveyed students and ended up with 675 DMUs. We chose the number of hours a student sleeps, attends classes, attends meetings, and spends on homework as our inputs since they all contribute to the final outcomes. We chose the GPA scores and level of happiness as our outputs since they display academic results and personal satisfaction level. Our results showed that although juniors and seniors were more efficient than freshmen and sophomores at time-management to achieve the same scale of outputs, the overall efficiency across each class year and across the entire student body was surprisingly high.  

Table of Contents

Introduction 4

Background 4

Project Description 4

Methodology 5

VBA Model 7

Results 7

Conclusions 9

Introduction

Background

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), developed by Charnes, Cooper ad Rhodes in 1978, is a linear programming technique that aims to force any organization to constantly evolve and improve. DEA identifies a “best-practice frontier” by analyzing the results of a balanced benchmarking test, a method that is efficient and has no room for assumptions. In order to conduct a balanced benchmarking test, Decision Making Units (DMUs) must be determined. DMUs operate so that multiple inputs can be converted into outputs. Inputs are the resources that organizations try to minimize or factors that contribute to an existing system and outputs are the outcomes that want to be maximized.

Project Description

Our goal for this project was to evaluate WPI students by their academic and sleep habits and understand the correlation to their academic...