5.5. Implementation guidance
5.5.1. General guidance
We have students complete this project outside of class in three parts. If the class includes time
value of money skills, the Long-Term Savings portion should be assigned after students learn these
skills. Otherwise, timing is flexible. On average, students report spending 6.3 hours (median 5.7 hours,
mode 5.2 hours, range 1.5 to 20.0 hours) on the entire project, so it is not overly time consuming.11
We usually make Income and Income Taxes due mid-semester and then schedule the other two sections
with consideration of other class activities and requirements.We count the project score as five
to six percent of the overall class grade and find that students are highly engaged in the project and
appear to be motivated by the experience rather than the grade.12 We explain some of the topics in
class as noted below and this takes an average of forty-five to sixty minutes of class time over the
course of the project.We also spend one to two hours outside of class answering students’ questions.
We designed an Excel workbook for each of the three sections of the project and we make these
available to students via our course management system. Each workbook contains worksheets with
the calculations referred to in the student instructions along with worksheets for their responses. Each
workbook also contains a grading rubric that provides students with a checklist of requirements as
well as evaluation guidelines for instructors. To expedite navigation through the workbooks, we have
color coded the tabs of all examples yellow, Sarah Yoo’s worksheets blue, and the student’s personal
version worksheets green.We have highlighted rows in the grading rubric that instructors may want
to change or delete depending on how they assign the sections. In addition, one set of columns can
be deleted if both scenarios are not assigned. We are happy to provide these workbooks on request.
Instructors may customize any of the spreadsheets without the authors’ approval.
Instructors need to give specific directions as to how to submit the assignment. Students could upload
files into a course management system (the completed Excel workbook or a sub-set of the workbook
spreadsheets), email them, submit printed copies, or a combination of these. If students will be submitting
paper copies, we suggest directing them to submit the grading rubric as the first page.
We suggest assignment and customization options below. These allow individual instructors to adapt
the project according to the appropriate level of emphasis for the amount of class and instructor time
they want to commit. In general, we provide a standard set of scenarios that require students to complete
the exercises using data for a friend, Sarah Yoo. We then provide instructions for students to
complete a personalized response to the same set of requirements. This allows instructors to choose
more simplified grading of a single scenario, more time consuming grading required for individual
responses, or somewhere in-between.We believe that requiring students to complete a personal budget
that allows maximum customization for their own situation intensifies student engagement.13 However,
students can gain significant financial literacy insights from the PBP at any level of modification. Note
that Option 1.c below serves as the third customization option (no customization) for all three parts
of the project. Instructors can customize the grading rubrics for each section by deleting the “Sarah’s
Budget” column or the “Your Budget” column, and by deleting rows for items not assigned. We also
suggest placing Xs in or graying out cells that are not applicable.
Assignment options:
Note that an instructor may choose a different option for each of the three parts.
1 Have students complete the assignment for Sarah Yoo and submit it for grading and
a have students do a personal version and submit it for detailed evaluation.
b have students do a personal version and submit it for a completion check or extra credit.
c suggest that students do a personal version (but not for submission).