A state is considering a new financial-literacy graduation requirement. Perspective 1: Every student needs a dedicated personal-finance course before graduation. Perspective 2: Families and individual experience teach finance better than another school mandate. Perspective 3: Cross-curricular instruction can provide common knowledge without isolating finance from its social context. Write an essay that evaluates these perspectives and develops your own position.
What the evaluator is looking for
ACT readers reward a clear perspective, analysis of relationships among perspectives, relevant development, logical organization, precise language, and control of standard written English.
Planning approach
Defend a common finance requirement integrated with math and civics, while responding to claims that families teach money best.
Model response
Every graduate should learn personal finance, but the subject should connect mathematics, consumer law, and public policy rather than sit in an isolated course of slogans. A coordinated requirement can provide common knowledge while showing that financial choices occur within institutions, not only individual habits.
Families offer valuable experience, yet they cannot reliably teach rules they have never encountered or opportunities they were denied. Students need practice reading a pay stub, comparing loan terms, recognizing fraud, building a budget, and understanding compound growth. Leaving that knowledge to chance widens inequality. On the other hand, adding a thin semester course may crowd the schedule and reduce finance to warnings about coffee purchases.
States should specify a limited set of demonstrated competencies and allow districts to teach them across algebra, economics, government, and advisory periods. Students might calculate credit costs in math, study tenant rights in civics, and complete a capstone based on a realistic first-year income. Assessments should require decisions and explanations rather than vocabulary recall. Family stories can enrich these lessons without becoming the only curriculum. Financial literacy deserves graduation-level attention because money decisions are unavoidable; integration makes that attention deeper, more accurate, and less moralizing.
Structural breakdown
The position supports a mandate but rejects a superficial standalone class. It explains unequal home preparation and maps specific competencies into existing subjects and a practical capstone.
- Name concrete financial decisions students face.
- Explain why family instruction is uneven.
- Connect finance to several school subjects.
- Assess application rather than terminology.
Format reference: ACT: Description of the Writing Test. This model is original and is not an official or accepted submission.