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Students generally attempt to improve themselves with different manners in their spare time. Inspired by this fact, this paper presents a multi-objective elitist feedback teaching–learning-based optimization (MEFTO) algorithm for multi-objective optimization problems. To promote the exploration capacity and convergence of the basic teaching–learning-based optimization (TLBO), a feedback phase that simulates the spare-time learning phenomenon is introduced at the end of the learner phase. Students should compare their score with the average class score to select an appropriate means for further improvement. Poorly performing students can learn from the teacher directly for rapid improvement, whereas high-performing students prefer to motivate themselves for reinforcement learning. Non-dominated sorting is incorporated to permit this heuristic to solve problems with several objectives. Crowding distance calculation is adopted to maintain the diversity of the obtained solution set in a single run. Elitism strategy is also employed to provide a great improvement for the algorithm. The performance of the MEFTO algorithm is compared with seven other well-known algorithms by using a set of unconstrained benchmark test problems and three constrained engineering optimization problems. The qualitative and quantitative results indicate that the proposed algorithm can provide considerably competitive results and outperforms the other algorithms. • A novel multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MEFTO) is developed. • The developed algorithm is evaluated on a series of benchmark functions. • The performance of the MEFTO is demonstrated using various metrics. • The developed algorithm is applied to solve three constrained engineering problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]