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Large classes pose challenges in managing different types of skills (e.g. maths, subject-specific knowledge, writing, confidence and communication), facilitating interactions, enabling active learning and providing timely feedback. This paper shares a design of a set of assessments for a large undergraduate economics course consisting of students from diverse cultural backgrounds. The benefits, challenges and learning experiences of students are analysed.

Students worked in groups to complete an assessment with several questions which would be useful as a revision for the individual assessment, the following week. Survey questionnaires with Likert-type questions and open-ended questions were used to analyse the learning and skill development that occurred because of the group work. Responses to the open-ended survey questions were coded and analysed by identifying the themes and categorising the various issues that emerged.

This assessment design developed group working skills, created opportunities to interact and enhanced learning. The analysis of the responses found that working with peers enabled the students to generate their own feedback, clear doubts and learn to solve problems. Effective communication, planning meetings and working around the diverse group members’ strengths and weaknesses are some graduate skills that are developed in this group assessment. The challenges were arranging meetings, finalising assessments, engagement of group members and unreliable technology. However, the students found ways to overcome these challenges.

This assessment design can be useful in higher education practice by introducing a mechanism for authentic collaborative practice. This paper adds to the literature on peer interactions and group work and enables effective learning at scale.

In recent years, there has been an expanding literature on the socio‐economic determinants of religiosity. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this stream of the literature by studying the impact of life expectancy on religiosity through a theoretical decision‐making framework, and by separately examining the decision of young and old individuals with respect to religious participation.

The paper analyses religiosity through a cost‐benefit framework, where decisions at each point in time depend on expected social and spiritual benefits attached to religious adherence (both contemporaneously, as well as in the afterlife), the probability of entering heaven in the afterlife, as well as the costs of formal religion in terms of time allocated to religious activities. It provides the theoretical underpinnings for the negative correlation between life expectancy and religious attendance previously observed in empirical analysis.

The analysis reveals how increases in life expectancy encourage postponement of religious involvement, particularly in religion doctrines that do not necessarily link salvation (or afterlife benefits more broadly) to the timing of religiosity. This demonstrates that religious establishments should anticipate to attract older members, particularly in countries which have high life expectancy or expect significant increases in life expectancy, although current socio‐economic benefits can counterbalance the negative impact of life expectancy on religiosity and hence encourage religious involvement.

The paper contributes to the literature on the economics of religion by exploring the mediating role of life expectancy in explaining cross‐country differences in religious expression, a channel that has so far received little attention in the literature. Its innovation lies in distinguishing decision making over different time intervals and evaluating the role of benefits and costs through the life cycle and in the afterlife.