Here’s a link:
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/070702/kyodo/d8q48ako0.html

As far as the refunds, I guess it depends on the situation.

Just talking in the abstract imagine the following situation. I offer you a discount if you promise to take one year of lessons from me. You take the discount, but then don’t take one full year of lessons. What am I suppose to do?

At least part of of what Nova did was to refund the lessons as if there had been no discount. They said, well, as you really aren’t going to be taking lessons as long as you said, then you shouldn’t have gotten a discount for the lessons you did take. So we will factor that into your refund.

Of course, that’s not all that was going on. People were wanting a refund because they couldn’t take the lessons! Or because the service was poor. And as I understand it, they had either NOT been informed or been misinformed as to how refunds were done.

Also, I think there might have been some other shady accounting going into the refund method.

While not referring specifically to the Nova case, as long as the refund method is specified up front, and there is no legitimate complaint against the company, then some type of refund method that takes into account people are breaking their agreement and thus must pay a penalty of some sort, seems fair to me.