High school students in Ontario will need to pass a financial literacy test in order to graduate
First question: if you’re $485 billion in debt, should you buy a $28.9-million plane?
Education Minister Paul Calandra is following through with a plan to ensure Ontario high school students graduate with some level of financial literacy.
According to the Canadian Press, before completing grade 12, students will have to pass a financial literacy test with a mark of at least 70 per cent. Calandra has said this is to ensure students understand personal and home economics, including budgeting and money management.
Related: First-time homebuyers have returned to the market—with a little help from their parents
Calandra’s curriculum updates, including the financial literacy test, were meant to be implemented at the beginning of this school year, but Calandra decided to allow teachers more time to build related lessons into their course plans.
TVO is developing student coursework, which will include education modules and test questions.
While financial literacy is inarguably important, some critics have questioned the effectiveness of the mandatory testing, which could cause “a negative association with personal finances for a young person,” Gail Henderson, director of the business law program at Queen’s University and a financial literacy education researcher, told the Canadian Press last year.
Henderson suggested that confidence-building assignments over time would be better than a high-pressure testing environment.
The financial literacy test is one of several significant changes put forward by Calandra. More recently, he announced that attendance and participation could be worth up to 15 per cent of final grades. According to government data published by CTV News, just 40.2 per cent of Ontario high school students attended 90 per cent of their classes during the 2024-2025 school year.
Related: The provincial government has proposed a bill to overhaul how school boards are run
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
