Decision Making for The Most Outstanding Students Award using TOPSIS: a Case Study at Institut Teknologi Sumatera

The internal selection of Pemilihan Mahasiswa Berprestasi, also known as Pilmapres


INTRODUCTION
To enhance the quality of Indonesian youth, Balai Pengembangan Talenta Indonesia (BPTI) annually held the national award for the most outstanding students, which is known in Bahasa as "Pemilihan Mahasiswa Berprestasi" or "Pilmapres".The implementation of Pilmapres is in harmony with the constitution in force in Indonesia about higher education (UU nomor 12 tahun 2012 tentang Pendidikan Tinggi), which the goal is to develop the college alumnus competencies by extracurricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular activities, which one of the implementations is carried out by giving an award for the most outstanding students for their achievements during their bachelor's study period in the college.To choose the most outstanding students in the regional and national stage, the decision is made by calculating each student's points in (1) general achievements, (2) creative ideas, and (3) English competencies [1].JINITA Vol. 5, No. 2, December 2023 DOI: doi.org/10.35970/jinita.v5i2.2114Institut Teknologi Sumatera (ITERA), which is one of the technology institutes growing rapidly in Sumatera, annually sends its best students to compete in Pilmapres.To obtain the best students to be sent into the Pilmapres competition each year, ITERA's student task force (Satgas Kemahasiswaan ITERA) held an internal selection of Pilmapres.The best students from each faculty in ITERA are sent to compete with each other by exhibiting their general achievements and presenting their creative ideas to solve problems using English as the main language.The scores of each participant are given by a board of jury which come from each faculty in ITERA.However, the decision-making to obtain the 1 st , 2 nd , and 3 rd place of the most outstanding students is complicated and potentially subjective, thus the final decision had the potential to be biased.
To overcome the problem, The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), as one of the methods in Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM), was implemented as a decision support tool to obtain the most outstanding students from Pilmapres ITERA held in 2023.TOPSIS uses: (1) the longest distance from the negative ideal solution, and (2) the shortest distance from the positive ideal solution as the calculation basis for determining the optimal solution of alternatives and ranking the preferences.The optimal solution and rank generated by TOPSIS will further be used as a reference for decision-making [2].The advantages of TOPSIS are the simplicity of the concept, ease of understanding, and a good level of computational efficiency [3].
In this study, TOPSIS was used as a decision support tool for choosing the most outstanding students in Pilmapres of Institut Teknologi Sumatera (ITERA) in 2023.The difference between this study and previous studies is that the criteria in this study are in according with the Puspresnas (Pusat Prestasi Nasional) guide of Pilmapres released in 2023, with a few modifications based on the discussion results between the members of the board of jury.Alternatives used in this study were the students of ITERA from various departments which competed in the process.The calculation results using TOPSIS were used as the reference for decision-making on selecting the most outstanding students for the event in 2023.

METHODOLOGY
The methodology used in this study consists of two stages: (1) data collection from all members of the board of jury, and (2) data processing using TOPSIS.The result of the TOPSIS calculation was used as the basis for selecting the winners of most outstanding students in the internal selection of Pemilihan Mahasiswa Berprestasi (Pilmapres) of Institut Teknologi Sumatera (ITERA) in 2023.

Data Collection
Nine members of the board of jury were assigned by the committees to give the scores for five students who participated in the final stage of internal selection of Pilmapres ITERA in 2023.Two members were assigned to give scores for the general achievements of students.Whereas, three members were assigned to give the scores for English competencies and four members were assigned to give the scores for creative ideas.The rubric used for the scoring activities was based on the guidelines provided by Puspresnas, which consists of several criteria related to general achievements, English competencies, and creative ideas, each with assigned weights.Data on the scores were collected by the committees using a Google Spreadsheet which was accessible from the notebooks provided for all members of the board of jury.The documentation of the scoring session by the board of jury is presented in Figure 1.

Data Processing
The collected scores which were given by all members of the board of jury to each student in each aspect and sub-aspects of general achievements, English competencies, and creative ideas were calculated, averaged, and further used for calculation using TOPSIS by the committees.The steps in the TOPSIS calculation are as follows: [4]

1) Creating the decision matrix
A decision matrix was created according to the number of criteria used.This study was using (1) general achievements, (2) creative ideas, and (3) English competencies as the criteria.

3) Multiplying the weight of criteria to the normalized decision matrix
Each data in the normalized decision matrix was multiplied by the weight of each criterion using the following equation: Where i = 1, 2, 3, …, m and j = 1, 2, 3, …, n.

4) Determining the positive ideal and negative ideal solutions
The positive ideal solution (ID*) and negative ideal solutions (ID') were calculated by the following equations: With the following conditions:

Determining the distance between alternatives to positive and negative ideal solutions
The distance between each alternative to its positive ideal solution (  + ) and negative ideal solution (  − ) was calculated by following equation:

6) Determining the preference score for each alternative
The preference score for each alternative was calculated by the following equation: The alternative that had the highest preference score is further selected as the final solution for the decision-making problem.The alternatives in this study were the students participating in the final stage of internal selection of Pilmapres ITERA in 2023.Further, the student who has the highest preference score would be selected as the 1 st winner, followed by 2 nd and 3 rd winners.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
There are 5 ITERA students which were participating in the final stage of the internal selection: (1) Alpha, (2) Beta, (3) Omega, (4) Gamma, and (5) Delta.In this study, the real name of the students is concealed to avoid any potential conflicts in the future.The average scores obtained for general achievements, creative ideas, and English competencies from the board of jury for each student are presented in Tables 1, 2, and 3, respectively.The average scores of general achievements, the sum of weight JINITA Vol. 5, No. 2, December 2023 DOI: doi.org/10.35970/jinita.v5i2.2114* average scores of English competencies, and the sum of weight * average scores of creative ideas for all students are further listed in the decision matrix presented in Table 4 In this study, it should be noted that the weights used in Tables 2 and 3 were obtained from the rubric given by Puspresnas guidelines and used solely for calculating the sum of weight * average scores for each participant.Meanwhile, the weights used for TOPSIS calculations are determined by the joint decision between the committees and the jury board.The weight implemented for each criterion of (1) general achievement, (2) creative ideas, and (3) English competencies for TOPSIS calculation was 50, 30, and 20, respectively.These TOPSIS weights are also presented in Table 4.The values in each column of the decision matrix from Table 4 were normalized to obtain a normalized decision matrix, which is done by using equation (1).Furthermore, the weights were multiplied by the values in the normalized decision matrix to create a weighted normalized matrix.The weighted normalized matrix calculated based on equation ( 2) is presented in Table 5. Hereafter, the positive ideal solution and negative decision value can be determined.All criteria used in this study were categorized as benefits, thus the value of the positive ideal solution for each criterion would be max yij.Whereas, the value

Table 1 .
. The scores of general achievements of the students

Table 2 .
The scores of English competencies of the students

Table 3 .
The scores of creative ideas of the students