What Assessments Should You Use for a Financial Literacy Class?
Last updated: September 2026. Written and fact-checked by Clarissa Collins, Rapunzl editorial team. Every external figure below is quoted from the publisher's own page and cited in full in Sources.
A financial literacy class needs three layers of assessment: a pre- and post-test to show overall growth, regular formative checks woven through instruction, and at least one performance task, like a graded investing-simulator portfolio, that measures applied decision-making, not just recall. Rapunzl, a financial-literacy platform for grades 6–12, builds all three into its curriculum and real-time investing simulator.
Key Facts at a Glance
- A course needs at least three assessment types. A pre/post-test for growth, weekly formative checks for real-time feedback, and one performance task or simulation-based assessment that grades a decision instead of a fact.
- NGPF's Financial Literacy Progress & Efficacy Assessment (FLPEA) is free and national. Run through a partnership between NGPF and Penn State Behrend, it's a pre/post-test for grades 9–12 that benchmarks a class against national results, with results uploaded about ten days after each administration (NGPF, 2026).
- The Council for Economic Education's Test of Financial Literacy (TFL) is a 45-question multiple-choice exam built for eleventh and twelfth graders (also used with tenth) and designed "to aid teachers in assessing and improving the quality of high school teaching of personal finance" (Walstad & Rebeck, Council for Economic Education, 2016).
- The W!se Financial Literacy Certification Test doubles as an outside credential. It runs across a national network in 49 states and Guam, and some states, including Virginia, publicly recognize schools for strong student performance on it (W!se, 2026; Virginia Department of Education, 2026).
- Don't grade a simulator unit on final portfolio value. Short-term returns are mostly luck; grade the trade journal, the written rationale, and the reflection instead (Georgia Council on Economic Education, 2019).
- NEFE retired its High School Financial Planning Program, HSFPP, including its own assessment, at the end of the 2020–21 school year. If an older list still recommends it, treat that recommendation as out of date (National Endowment for Financial Education, 2026).
- Standards touchpoint: every assessment below should trace back to the CEE/Jump$tart National Standards for Personal Financial Education (2021), organized around six areas: Earning Income, Saving, Spending, Investing, Managing Credit, and Managing Risk.
What types of assessment does a financial literacy class actually need?
Three types cover most of what a personal finance course needs to measure: a pre/post-test to show growth over the term, formative checks built into each lesson, and at least one performance task or simulation-based assessment that grades a decision instead of a fact. Each does a different job, and a course that only uses one of them is missing information a teacher, a parent, or a district actually needs.
A pre/post-test answers "did this course move the needle." Formative checks answer "is this specific lesson landing right now, while there's still time to fix it." A performance task, such as a graded investing-simulator unit, answers a harder question: can the student actually apply the concept under realistic conditions, where there's no single correct multiple-choice answer. Most established programs, and Rapunzl's own curriculum, use some combination of all three rather than relying on one test date to carry the whole grade.
Which pre- and post-tests do teachers actually use?
Two free, third-party instruments dominate this space: NGPF's Financial Literacy Progress & Efficacy Assessment and the Council for Economic Education's Test of Financial Literacy. Both are pre/post-test models, and both are built specifically for high school personal finance, not general economics.
NGPF's Financial Literacy Progress & Efficacy Assessment (FLPEA) is a free national assessment run through a partnership with Penn State Behrend. It's built for grades 9–12, requires a teacher to be assessing at least two standard areas, and follows a straightforward model: administer it near the start of the course, administer the same assessment again toward the end, and NGPF returns both an individual classroom report and aggregated national results so a teacher can see how their class compares to the broader FLPEA pool (NGPF, 2026).
The Council for Economic Education's Test of Financial Literacy (TFL), developed by researchers William Walstad and Ken Rebeck, is a 45-item multiple-choice exam that takes roughly 45 minutes and covers six content areas: earning income, buying goods and services, saving, using credit, financial investing, and protecting or insuring financial assets. It's built primarily for eleventh and twelfth graders, though the examiner's manual notes it has also been administered to tenth graders, and CEE frames its purpose plainly: to help teachers assess and improve the quality of their own high school personal finance instruction, not just to score students (Walstad & Rebeck, Council for Economic Education, 2016).
Two other names come up in this conversation, and it's worth being direct about where each actually stands. The W!se Financial Literacy Certification Test functions less like a classroom pre/post-test and more like an end-of-course credentialing exam. Students who complete a personal finance course take the test once, and a passing score earns the W!se Certified Financially Literate (CFL) credential, something a college application or an employer can verify. W!se runs this in a national network across 49 states and Guam, provides its own professional development and pretesting resources, and even ranks top-performing schools on its "W!se 100" list; Virginia is among the states that have publicly recognized schools for their students' performance on the test (W!se, 2026; Virginia Department of Education, 2026). And if you've come across a personal finance reading list that still recommends NEFE's High School Financial Planning Program (HSFPP) and its accompanying assessment: NEFE retired that curriculum, along with Smart About Money, at the end of the 2020–21 academic year, after it had reached an estimated 12 million students over more than three decades. NEFE has since shifted its own mission toward research rather than classroom curriculum, so HSFPP isn't a current option (National Endowment for Financial Education, 2026).
Rapunzl's curriculum includes its own built-in pre-testing tools alongside online practice quizzes, so a teacher who wants a pre/post-test tied directly to the modules being taught doesn't have to bolt on a separate outside instrument to get one.
What formative checks work best during a unit?
Formative checks are short, low-stakes, and happen while a lesson is still fresh, so a teacher can catch a misunderstanding before it hardens into a wrong answer on the unit test. They're not the tool for a final grade; they're the tool for adjusting tomorrow's lesson.
NGPF's own teacher-facing assessment guidance draws this line: formative assessments "capture your students' understanding of newly delivered content" and let students identify their own strengths and gaps before a summative test raises the stakes. In practice that means things like an exit ticket at the end of class, ten comprehension questions tied to a single lesson, or a quiz game run through Kahoot, Quizizz, or Quizlet, quick enough to run in five minutes without eating into instructional time (NGPF, 2026). Summative assessments sit at the other end of that same spectrum: a unit test given once a topic like credit or investing wraps up, weighted more heavily because it's measuring mastery rather than a day's progress.
A third option worth running alongside both is portfolio-based grading: instead of one test date, a teacher compiles student work over the term, trade journals, short reflections, a company report, so growth shows up in the body of work itself rather than in a single score (NGPF, 2026). This pairs naturally with a simulator-based unit, where the "test" is really a running record of decisions.
How do you build a performance task or simulation-based assessment?
A performance task should grade the reasoning behind a decision, not the outcome the market happened to hand back. This matters most in an investing simulator unit, where a lucky trade can outperform a well-reasoned one over a short window, and grading on the wrong metric quietly teaches students the wrong lesson about risk.
The Georgia Council on Economic Education's guidance for stock market game programs states this directly: "it would be unfair to grade students on the value of their team's portfolio," and instead recommends grading across four categories that any teacher can mix and match. Write covers the rationale behind a trade, a strategy essay, or a company position paper. Track covers a complete transaction log and a chart of portfolio performance over time. Analyze covers whether a trade reflects speculation or genuine investing reasoning, and how current events moved a position. Report covers a written or oral company report on one holding (Georgia Council on Economic Education, 2019). A rubric built from those four categories, weighted toward the trade journal and the closing reflection, rewards good decision-making even when a particular stock didn't cooperate. For a full grading rubric and the most common mistakes to avoid, see How to Grade a Stock Market Simulation Without Rewarding Luck.
Assessment type, purpose, and timing at a glance
| Assessment type | Purpose | When to use it | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-test / post-test | Show overall knowledge growth across the course | Start and end of the semester or unit | NGPF's FLPEA; CEE's Test of Financial Literacy; Rapunzl's built-in pre/post assessment |
| Formative check | Catch a misunderstanding while there's still time to fix it | During or right after each lesson | Exit tickets, short comprehension questions, a Kahoot/Quizizz/Quizlet quiz |
| Summative unit test | Confirm mastery of one topic before moving on | End of each unit (credit, investing, budgeting, etc.) | A teacher-built unit exam; NGPF's unit and semester-course tests |
| Performance task / simulation-based | Grade applied decision-making, not recall | Across a multi-week simulator or project unit | A graded investing-simulator portfolio with a trade journal, company report, and reflection essay |
| Portfolio-based grading | Show growth across the whole term, not one test day | Collected throughout, reviewed at the end | A folder of journal entries, company reports, and reflections |
| External certification | Give students an outside-verified credential | End of course, typically optional | The W!se Financial Literacy Certification Test (CFL credential) |
How do these assessments line up with national standards?
Every assessment on this list should map back to the same six areas: Earning Income, Saving, Spending, Investing, Managing Credit, and Managing Risk. That's the structure the Council for Economic Education and the Jump$tart Coalition jointly set in the 2021 National Standards for Personal Financial Education, and it's the reference point most state standards and most curricula, including Rapunzl's, build their own scope and sequence against (Council for Economic Education & Jump$tart Coalition, 2021).
The Test of Financial Literacy's six content areas (earning income, buying goods and services, saving, using credit, financial investing, and protecting or insuring assets) map almost one-to-one onto those same six standard areas, just worded slightly differently (Walstad & Rebeck, Council for Economic Education, 2016). That overlap is useful in practice: it means a teacher can check a single assessment's blueprint against the national standards and see, area by area, whether the test is actually measuring what the course claims to teach, rather than assuming alignment because a vendor's marketing page says so. Many curricula build this crosswalk directly into the teacher-facing materials so it doesn't have to be done by hand every semester.
A five-step plan for building your assessment stack this semester
- Give a low-stakes pre-test in week one. Use NGPF's FLPEA, the CEE Test of Financial Literacy, or a curriculum's own built-in pre-test, whichever matches the standards you're already teaching to.
- Layer in weekly formative checks. An exit ticket or a five-minute quiz game after each lesson tells you what to reteach before it shows up on a unit test.
- Give a summative test at the end of each major unit. Credit, saving, investing, and risk each deserve their own checkpoint rather than one cumulative test at the very end.
- Add one performance task tied to a real decision. A simulator-based portfolio, graded with a Write/Track/Analyze/Report rubric, shows whether students can apply a concept, not just recognize it on a multiple-choice item.
- Close with the same pre-test as a post-test. Administering the identical instrument at the end of the term is what actually produces a growth number you can report to a department head, a principal, or a parent, and it's optional but worth pairing with an external certification exam like W!se's if your state recognizes it.
How Rapunzl fits into an assessment plan
Rapunzl provides a standards-aligned personal finance curriculum built around our real-time investment simulator, and assessment is built into the curriculum itself rather than bolted on afterward. Students work through built-in pre-testing tools and online practice quizzes as they move through modules, so a teacher gets formative signal without assembling a separate quiz bank from scratch.
The simulator itself doubles as the performance task. Students manage a simulated $10,000 stock-and-crypto portfolio on live Nasdaq pricing, and the educator dashboard gives a teacher grade export and standards crosswalks in one place, so the Write/Track/Analyze/Report style grading described above doesn't require a separate spreadsheet. Assessment grades also export to work with most SSO providers, so scores land where a school's gradebook already lives.
In Rapunzl's own program data, students average 34% on the baseline financial-literacy assessment before starting the course and 93% on that same assessment afterward. That's a self-reported before/after result from Rapunzl's own pre- and post-program testing, not a claim benchmarked against any outside average.
Frequently Asked
Questions
Use both. A post-test alone tells you where students ended up, but without a pre-test you can't show growth, and growth is usually the number a department head or a district actually wants to see (NGPF, 2026).
Formative checks happen during instruction and are meant to be caught and fixed quickly, like an exit ticket; summative assessments happen at the end of a unit or course and carry more weight because they're measuring mastery, not a single day's progress (NGPF, 2026).
Yes. NGPF's Financial Literacy Progress & Efficacy Assessment is free, built for grades 9–12, and returns national results alongside your own class's report, so you can see how your students compare beyond your own building (NGPF, 2026).
Grade the trade journal, the company research, and the reflection essay, not the final portfolio balance; a short-term simulation rewards luck far more than skill, so the portfolio's dollar value is the wrong thing to score (Georgia Council on Economic Education, 2019).
No. NEFE retired the HSFPP curriculum and its assessment at the end of the 2020–21 school year and has since moved its focus to research rather than classroom materials (National Endowment for Financial Education, 2026).
It can, if it's graded on process rather than outcome. Rapunzl's simulator pairs a real-time $10,000 portfolio with an educator dashboard for grade export and standards crosswalks, so a teacher can run it as the course's performance task rather than a side activity.
The Council for Economic Education and Jump$tart Coalition's 2021 National Standards for Personal Financial Education, built around six areas: Earning Income, Saving, Spending, Investing, Managing Credit, and Managing Risk (Council for Economic Education & Jump$tart Coalition, 2021).
Build your assessment plan with a free simulator
Start with a pre-test in week one, run formative checks through the term, and use Rapunzl's real-time investing simulator as the performance task that ties it all together. If you're building the whole course around it, the prebuilt Personal Finance course already carries the pre-testing tools, practice quizzes, and educator dashboard described above.
More in this pillar: Teaching Financial Literacy · How to Grade a Stock Market Simulation Without Rewarding Luck · Standards-Aligned Personal Finance Lessons · A Standards Crosswalk
Sources
- NGPF, "The Financial Literacy Progress & Efficacy Assessment" (FLPEA administration guide: grades 9–12, pre/post model, national results). https://www.ngpf.org/flpea-administer/ (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- NGPF, "Assessment" (Teacher Toolkit: formative vs. summative assessment, portfolio-based grading). https://www.ngpf.org/teacher-toolkit/classroom-instruction/assessment/ (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- William B. Walstad & Ken Rebeck, "Test of Financial Literacy: Examiner's Manual," Council for Economic Education (45-item exam, grades 11–12, six content areas). https://www.councilforeconed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/TFL-manual-final-040416.pdf (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- Council for Economic Education & Jump$tart Coalition, "National Standards for Personal Financial Education" (2021: six standard areas). https://www.councilforeconed.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2021-National-Standards-for-Personal-Financial-Education.pdf (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- W!se, "Financial Literacy Certification" (CFL credential, national network, 49 states and Guam). https://www.wise-ny.org/programs-services/financial-literacy/financial-literacy-certification/ (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- Virginia Department of Education, "Economics & Personal Finance" (state recognition of the W!se test toward the course requirement). https://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching-learning-assessment/instruction/economics-personal-finance (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- National Endowment for Financial Education, "Announcing the Retirement of NEFE's Educational Programs" (HSFPP retired end of 2020–21 school year). https://www.nefe.org/initiatives/curriculum-retirement.aspx (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- Georgia Council on Economic Education, "Teaching the Game" (Write/Track/Analyze/Report grading categories; grading against portfolio value called unfair). https://www.gcee.org/post/teaching-game (retrieved 2026-09-21)
- Rapunzl (first-party product facts: built-in pre-testing tools and practice quizzes, educator dashboard with grade export and standards crosswalks, integration with most SSO providers (no named LMS/SIS partner, per site accuracy guardrails), self-reported 34%→93% pre/post assessment scores). https://rapunzl.com/simulator (retrieved 2026-09-21)
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