Linguistic Neutrosophic Sets with Application to Group Decision-Making to Enhance the Work Effectiveness Evaluation of University Counselors

The evaluation of university counselors' work effectiveness in the new era aims to assess their performance in areas such as ideological and political education (IPE), psychological counseling, academic support, and daily management. The evaluation typically includes counselors' performance in guiding students’ thoughts, promoting mental health, crisis intervention, and career planning. A scientific and comprehensive evaluation system can improve the quality of counselors' work and promote students' holistic development. The work effectiveness evaluation of university counselors is multiple-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM). Recently, Exponential TODIM (ExpTODIM) and TOPSIS approaches have been introduced to address MAGDM. The 2-tuple linguistic neutrosophic sets (2TLNSs) have emerged as a powerful tool for representing uncertain data, particularly in the evaluation of university counselors' work effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a 2-tuple linguistic neutrosophic Exponential TODIM-TOPSIS (2TLNN-ExpTODIM TOPSIS) approach to solve MAGDM problems with 2TLNSs. A numerical study on the work effectiveness evaluation of university counselors is presented to validate the 2TLNN-ExpTODIM TOPSIS approach. The major contributions of this research are outlined: (1) Information entropy based on score and accuracy functions is developed using 2TLNSs to determine weight information; (2) The 2TLNN-ExpTODIM-TOPSIS approach is integrated to handle MAGDM; (3) An illustrative example of university counselors' work effectiveness evaluation is provided to demonstrate the 2TLNN-ExpTODIM-TOPSIS method; (4) Comparative analyses are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the 2TLNN-ExpTODIM-TOPSIS approach.