Composite indicators are a very useful tool for conveying summary information on the overall performance of institutions and facilitating decision-making. Increasingly, there is a demand for indicators that allow performance to be assessed after the implementation of a strategy. This has several difficulties, and in this paper, we address three of them: how to evaluate at different points in time, how to estimate the weighting of the criteria and how to normalize the data. Our proposal is based on multicriteria techniques, using a recent method, uwTOPSIS, and is applied to data collected from 2975 students enrolled in the first year of science and engineering at the Industrial University of Santander (Colombia) from the first semester of 2016 to the first semester of 2019. In the paper, we show that our proposal makes it possible to measure and evaluate the academic performance of students at two points in time, and this allows the University to know whether its student support policy has been successful and to what degree it has been effective. Due to the large amount of data handled, data management has been done using R programming language, and model implementation has been done with Python.

ESG criteria are becoming increasingly important for institutional and retail investors with a consequent growing demand of reliable and transparent ESG data to support their decisions. Several ESG rating agencies assess companies providing ratings and rankings. However, their rating methodologies are subject to some criticisms. One of the main weaknesses is the determination of the relative importance of the ESG criteria involved in the rating process. In this work, we propose the use of a MCDM rating and ranking approach with which the decision maker can rank firms based on their ESG global performance without the elicitation of aggregation weights. The approach, UW-TOPSIS, provides three outputs: the global ESG rating of the firms, a ranking based on the ratings and, for each alternative, a vector of weights describing the discriminatory power of the ESG criteria on the alternative, thus overcoming one of the criticisms to the methodologies of ESG rating agencies. However, UW-TOPSIS has a limitation as it does not provide a global vector of weights valid for all the alternatives in the ranking, expressing the overall role or contribution of each criteria to the componsition of the ranking. The acknowledge and analysis of this situation and the proposal of a solution, is the main objective of this paper.

Information about the paper titled "CHARACTERIZATION OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS THROUGH INDICATORS OF ADEQUACY AND EXCELLENCE. ANALYSIS FROM GENDER AND SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS PERSPECTIVE" at IATED Digital Library