A Note about a New Index to Evaluate Teaching Quality

Aim of this paper is to study a new index, called CI that has been proposed to measure the teaching quality in University courses. The questionnaire adopted by many Italian Universities to evaluate teaching quality of courses, has many items surveyed on a four points ordinal scale. This solution has many advantages and some limitations. Civardi (2002) has proposed a new index that summarizes results on each item for a single course on an interval [-1, 1]. The CI index is the algebraic sum of two indexes: an index expressing the score obtained on the half-plane of positive assessments and another corresponding to the half-plane of negative ones. In order to study the main characteristic of the CI index we have considered its sample space under different situations.