Evaluating and Ranking of University Departments Using DEA

In today's competitive world, all organizations call for optimum use of resources and capacities which are available in other sectors. Having access to a model however, by which the organizations’ officials could provide feedback to improve the performance of their different units and departments, is quite crucial. On the other hand university as a learning environment that has a significant role in promoting community development is also interested in using the appropriate model to evaluate the performance of its departments. This will help it to be able not only to identify efficient and inefficient groups, but also to increase decision-making power of managers in achieving the university’s missions and visions. Therefore, based on the nine proposed scenarios, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to evaluate efficiency of the university‘s departments main aspects including educational quantity, educational quality, research and scientific activities. In fact, by designing of these scenarios, main reasons and sources of efficiency and inefficiency of each academic department and also the impact degree of any of these factors were analyzed and evaluated.The findings revealed that nearly all of departments were not working efficiently and in all of four aspects were working with lowest level of efficiency. Also in terms of research activities and services the findings showed that most of departments had shown a weak performance.