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Background: Instructors often use a point-based system for grading students (e.g., 100 or 1000 total points). This system can impact student outcomes. Objective: The purpose of this research was to examine the implications of different point value courses for student emotions, perceptions of courses, and classroom performance. Method: The lab-based study used an experimental design to gather student responses to a hypothetical course with one of three potential total point values (100, 1,000, or 100,000 points). The classroom-based study examined student responses to different point values in 12 actual courses in which students were enrolled (with either 100 or 1000 total points). Results: In the lab-based study, courses with greater total point values (i.e., 1000 and 100,000) had greater emotional impact than a course with 100 total points. Participants in these conditions also preferred a course that featured a pass/fail scheme. In the classroom-based study, students in the 100-point condition (vs. 1000-point condition) missed more assignments, and as a consequence, performed more poorly in their course. Conclusion: Higher total point values in courses may have a more significant impact on students' emotions, and as a consequence, they may miss less work, and perform better in the course overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2005.08.004 Byline: Graeme Guthrie (a), John Small (b), Julian Wright (c) Abstract: Regulators across many different jurisdictions and industries have recently adopted the practice of setting access prices based on the current costs of providing the relevant facilities. Though widely regarded as being efficient, the efficiency implications of using current costs instead of historical costs have not been formally analyzed. Our analysis shows that given stochastic costs, forward-looking access prices retard investment and are generally dominated by access prices determined by historical cost whenever investment is desired. Author Affiliation: (a) School of Economics and Finance, P.O. Box 600, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand (b) University of Auckland, New Zealand (c) National University of Singapore, Singapore Article History: Received 23 June 2004; Accepted 5 August 2005

Aristide Briand's first government represents an intriguing moment of convergence in French political history. Several strands of reformist political thinking had been developing since the end of the Dreyfus affair, and Rene Waldeck-Rousseau's government of 1899-1902 inspired many ideas that reemerged ten years later; the most important of these were the reforms of French society and of the republican state. Not all republicans would have seen the two strands as linked, but in the speeches of Aristide Briand and the personalities of his principal lieutenants, a reformist agenda emerged designed to unite a country recently divided over Dreyfus and the church. 'Young' intellectual movements, whose roots went back to the 1890s, supported the government with a theory of political reform that was modern and realist. The immediate failure of Briand's 'moment of hope' does not detract from the significance, in the long term, of his experiment in reconciliation.

This paper presents a model of a card payment system to address the pricing and roles that govern such systems. It evaluates the social optimality of privately set interchange fees and the adoption of a rule by payment systems to prevent merchants surcharging for card transactions using two extremes of merchant pricing--monopolistic pricing and perfect competition. Both types of merchant pricing constrain the ability of card schemes to use interchange fees and the no-surcharge role in anticompetitive ways, although for quite different reasons. The positive role of the no-surcharge rule in preventing excessive merchant surcharging is also highlighted. JEL classification: G21; L31; L42 Keywords: Payment systems; Banks; Credit; Debit cards; Interchange fees