Abstract
In recent years, and following the introduction of the European Higher Education Area,
universities have developed measurement mechanisms to ensure improvement in the
quality of their teaching and teaching staff. One of the measurement tools increasingly
used in Higher Education to implement continuous improvement policies for university
teaching is composite indicators, which are a mathematical aggregation of a selected
set of suitably weighted indicators. Composite indicator building should be
accompanied by sensitivity analysis to ensure good practice. However, this is rarely
done. Sensitivity analysis helps to improve the understanding and, ultimately, the
soundness of the composite. In most cases, sensitivity analysis shows that the weights
assigned to indicators do not reflect the actual importance of those indicators in the
aggregation to the composite because of the heteroskedasticity of, and correlation
between the underlying indicators. This paper proposes a composite indicator for the
teaching activity of academic staff in a Spanish university. As we shall see in the paper,
the desired weights stated by developers rarely represent the effective importance of
the components. Hence, we propose sensitivity analysis as a necessary tool for readjusting
weights in order to achieve the desired level of importance for each
component indicator.