An evaluation model for architectural design courses using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Evaluation of students' architectural designs is one of the main basis of the exploring of learning in architecture education. Architectural design courses is the major part of architecture education in universities, hence proper evaluation can identify weaknesses and drawbacks of student designs and help to fix the shortcomings of its. Nowadays, design evaluations has become one of the dissatisfaction of students and they believe this is not being done properly. They also believe there are no proper criteria for design assessments and professors mostly evaluate these courses with personal manner. Therefore, it seems necessary to study the appropriate way of evaluating these courses, which are agreed upon by architecture professors and deal with different dimensions of architectural design.To achieve the goal, two main questions of the research, can be formulated as follows: 1 (What criteria should be considered in evaluating architectural design courses? 2(What is the weight of each criteria of evaluating architectural design courses?The research method is descriptive-analytical and it’s based on survey. Data were collected from library resources. Weighting of criteria and indicators for evaluating design courses was done by expert survey (Delphi) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the expert choice (EC) software has been used.The results showed that in order to accurately evaluate the architectural design courses, evaluation should be done during and after the semester. A pairwise comparison also shows that continuous evaluation (weight 0.645) is much more important than end-of-term evaluation (weight 0.335).In the continuous evaluation of students' academic achievement (weight 0.345) and observance of ethical and disciplinary issues (weight 0.293) are most important.In end-of-term evaluation, the quality of the design is definitely more important than the quality of the presentation and paying attention to the semantic dimension (weight 0.445) is more important than other dimensions of the architectural design.