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This project was driven by a motivation to be as fair as possible in the assessment of students' group work. Achieving fairness in assessment is a recurrent them in group project assessment literature (Nordberg, 2009). All authors of this report teach modules with group projects, and acknowledged that discrepancies often exist between a mark assigned to a group and an individual's contribution. Our aims were to (a) collectively enhance our understanding of the issues that need to be considered when assessing a group work project and (b) collectively build our confidence in approaches chosen to overcome these challenges. The findings of a literature review on group work assessment informed the creation of a methodology to develop a toolkit which can be referred to when planning and setting group work assignments. An intermediary stage of this process was the development of an algorithm which incorporated user perspectives to assign associated values to assignment outputs and how they are assessed. This subjective user input, whether it is generated within a School, a subject matter or from a large sample of educators, can then be applied by associated users. An intended output of these potential processes is that the tailored toolkits can assist educators and/or programmes regardless of their teaching philosophy. Flash-cards were developed as a prototype of how the toolkit information can be visualised.

The n-dimensional hypercube quantum random walk (QRW) is a particularily appealing example of a quantum walk because it has a natural implementation on a register on $n$ qubits. However, any real implementation will encounter decoherence effects due to interactions with uncontrollable degrees of freedom. We present a complete characterization of the mixing properties of the hypercube QRW under a physically relevant Markovian decoherence model. In the local decoherence model considered the non-unitary dynamics are modeled as a sum of projections on individual qubits to an arbitrary direction on the Bloch sphere. We prove that there is always classical (asymptotic) mixing in this model and specify the conditions under which instantaneous mixing \textit{always} exists. And we show that the latter mixing property, as well as the classical mixing time, depend heavily on the exact environmental interaction and its strength. Therefore, algorithmic applications of the QRW on the hypercube, if they intend to employ mixing properties, need to consider both the walk dynamics and the precise decoherence model., Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures. Published version. Spelling of author name changed, no content changes in v4

Simulated performance intensity functions were used to quantitatively discriminate speech intelligibility through phoneme discrimination assessment. Listener test results for subjects with a wide range of sensorineural hearing losses were simulated using an auditory nerve model and compared to real listeners' unaided and aided performance. Simulations of NAL-RP and DSL 4.0 fitting algorithms were compared. Auditory nerve discharge patterns from the model were presented as neurograms. An automated ranking process was used to quantify neurogram degradation using a new measure, the Neurogram Similarity Index Measure (NSIM). The measure has previously been shown to correlate well in predictions of phoneme discrimination for normal hearing listeners in both quiet and noise. In this study, simulated responses to consonant-vowel-consonant word lists in a quiet environment at a range of presentation levels were used to produce phoneme discrimination scores. This represents a further step in validating the use of auditory nerve models to predict speech intelligibility for different hearing aid fitting methods in a simulated environment, allowing the potential for rapid prototyping and early design assessment of new hearing aid algorithms.