A new fuzzy method is developed using triangular/trapezoidal fuzzy numbers for evaluating a group's mean performance, when qualitative grades instead of numerical scores are used for assessing its members' individual performance. Also, a new technique is developed for solving Linear Programming problems with fuzzy coefficients and everyday life applications are presented to illustrate our results.

In an earlier work we have used the Triangular Fuzzy Numbers (TFNs)as an assessment tool of student skills.This approach led to an approximate linguistic characterization of the students' overall performance, but it was not proved to be sufficient in all cases for comparing the performance of two different student groups, since tywo TFNs are not always comparable. In the present paper we complete the above fuzzy assessment approach by presenting a defuzzification method of TFNS based on the Center of Gravity (COG) technique, which enables the required comparison. In addition we extend our results by using the Trapezoidal Fuzzy Numbers (TpFNs) too, which are a generalization of the TFNs, for student assessment and we present suitable examples illustrating our new results in practice.