Identifying the best university educational departments using data envelopment analysis

Selecting the best performer departments can be a difficult task when there are many applicants for comparison. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) representative a non parametric tool can be used as a fair technique to support the decision making process .Considering the fact that competition and dependency always exist between two real DMUs, a DMU must only be compared with real DMUs lying at different efficiency levels. This paper applied a contextdependent DEA to determine the best candidate relative to the others, evaluate the degree of excellence of best candidates' performance and then clusters them.