Question: How can you compare your courses? When you consider those that you have taken, it should be clear that some were better than others and that the good ones were, perhaps, good for different reasons. What are the important dimensions that affect the quality of a course? Some are obvious, such as the enthusiasm of an instructor, topic, and amount and type of work involved. Other aspects may not be quite so obvious; for example, how you perceive one course may depend on other courses you have had. In this problem, the objective is to create a "template" that will permit consistent evaluation of your courses. The procedure is essentially the same as it is for any multiattribute decision, except that you will be able to use the template to evaluate future courses. Thus, we do not have a set of alternatives available to use for the determination of scores and weights. (You want to think, however, about current and recent courses in making your assessments.) First, create a fundamental-objectives hierarchy that allows you to compare courses. Be sure to establish the fundamental objectives and operational attributes that will allow for the necessary comparisons. Constructing a set of objectives for comparing courses is considerably more difficult than comparing computers, apartments, or jobs.

You may find that many of the attributes you consider initially will overlap with others, leading to a confusing array of attributes that are interdependent. It may take considerable thought to reduce the degree of redundancy in your hierarchy and to arrive at one that is complete, decomposable, small enough to be manageable, and involves attributes that are easy to think about. Once you are satisfied with your objectives and attributes, imagine the best and worst courses for each attribute. Create attribute scales (constructed scales where appropriate) for each objective. The idea is to be able to return to these scales with any new course and determine utilities for each objective with relative ease. (Try using the homework utility function that you developed in Problem 15.14. You may have to rescale it so that your best alternative gets a 1 and the worst a 0.) Once you have created the attribute scales, you are ready to assess the weights. Try the swing-weighting or lottery approach for assessing the weights. (Pricing out may be difficult to do in this particular example. Can you place a dollar value on your attributes?) Finally, with scales and weights established, you are ready to evaluate courses. Try comparing three or four of your most recent courses. (Try evaluating one that you took more than a year ago. Can you remember enough about the course to assess the individual utilities with some degree of confidence?)

Problem: Being a student, you probably have well-developed feelings about homework. Given the same amount of material learned, the less the better, right? (I thought so!) Define homework as the number of hours spent outside of class on various assignments that enter into your final grade. Now, assuming that the amount of material learned is the same in all instances, assess your utility function for homework over the range from 0 hours per week (best) to 20 hours per week (worst)