Overview and dates

Scheduling and deadlines

• Initial meeting with supervisor: before  Friday of Week 2: 29th September 2023
• Project report submission:  12 noon on Friday 8th March 2024
• Project talks:  26th to 28th March 2024
• Project allocation 2023-24

Guide to honours projects and dissertations in the School of Mathematics [password protected]

Students can select projects for the upcoming year towards the end of Semester 2. Students on joint degrees who are interested in doing a project in either school, can take part in the project allocation in both schools and pick the problem they like best.

Project Organiser 

The Honours Project organiser is Susan Sierra and the course secretary is Alison Fairgrieve.  

I  will be available  to deal with any questions or comments related to projects. 

If you are in a group project 

Group projects help students to learn how to work in teams. 

The normal size of a group for a Year 4 project is four students. Sometimes, groups may consist of 2, 3 or 5 students.  

Basic principles 

• The project group must produce a single report and give a presentation on it. These are given a single, overall mark.  
• The group must assign responsibility for the various parts of the project and its members. 
• The challenge of group work is to find ways of using each group member's talents. 
• Each team member must commit fully to the project and  normally receives the same mark.  

Find out more information on different types of projects

Individual and Team Contribution 

By default each member of the group will get the same mark. In some exceptional cases, there may be a reason for an unequal distribution of marks. If any group member feels this should be the case,  then please raise the issue with your supervisor to discuss. This can then be discussed with your supervisor and everyone in the group in order to agree on the contribution of each member. If then there is an different distribution, please fill out the Group project Work Attribution form [password protected], and send it to Alison Fairgrieve, cc’ing Susan Sierra and the supervisor of your group. 

These are the rules for unequal mark distribution:

• Unequal mark distribution applies only to 30% of the mark for the project.  

• The remaining 70% must be divided equally between members of the group.  

• More explicitly, if the group has M people and the distribution is A1 + ... + AM=100, and the report has mark R, then the ith student gets the mark R(0.003*Ai*M+0.7).

• Requests for unequal mark distribution will be approved only if all effort was made to contact the member and that they used their full potential.

• The Board of Examiners may use their judgement to alter the distribution of marks. 

• The process of agreeing on relative contributions must take place immediately after the project is completed.