Evaluating university courses: Intuitionistic fuzzy sets with spline functions modelling

Spline functions are a very flexible and powerful tool, which has been adopted in several applied fields, such as the evaluation of Public Services. In this paper, we use splines to model membership and non-membership functions in the context of Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. Such choice allows us to properly consider, in a very general way, the degree of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, as well as the underlying uncertainty expressed by participants rating evaluation questionnaires. This is a compelling advantage of the fuzzy analysis as compared to the use of simple descriptive statistics. We apply this approach using the questionnaires prepared by the ANVUR to assess University courses, and we perform a sensitivity analysis to validate the results.