How do weights affect faculty performance evaluations?

Quite commonly, faculty performance evaluations use a weighted scheme. Individual faculty members are evaluated on a scale with respect to teaching, research, and service activities. These scores are then combined using predetermined weights to obtain a combined score that is often used to compare different members. The presented study aimed to investigate the effects of selecting the weights on the individual scores and rankings. The interest is not on single faculty members, but rather on the systems aspects of the practice. That is, how do the weights affect the educational system as a whole? How sensitive is the evaluation system to the selection of the weights? In order to question the leverage a decision maker who determines the weights would have on the outcome of the rankings, the approach based on numerical examples and formal linear programming (LP) considerations is used.