DOI: 10.36347/sjpms

Pages: 44-56

Ranking tertiary institutions provides a good motivation, since it engenders healthy competition among stakeholders to strive for excellence. The issue of concern now might be finding a fair measure of the various criteria for this purpose. When institutions are endowed differently, then one fair criterion of assessing them would be to find an algorithm to measure their academic impart on the students by the level of output during the tertiary education. At the moment, there is the GPA which measures the output of the students during this period. What remains is to find a similar measure – a default estimate of students’ output, using their in-take grades, so that the difference between the CGPA and the in-take grade index (SIGI) will provide some measure of the level of impact. A departure, positively or negatively, from the SIGI will determine how well the student was affected, giving the prevailing conditions specific to the institution. This is the objective of the study. The study proposed an algorithm using the procedures of performing principal component factor analysis to obtained weights specific to the six subject areas used to admit students into tertiary institutions, by subjecting the entire data of a group of students to factor analysis procedures. These weights are subsequently used in the final formula to compute the SIGI, after testing and ascertaining the fitness of the factor model. To test the algorithm, records of some 618 past students of Ho Polytechnic, taken randomly from the past three academic years, were used