Hey teachers!
We are excited to announce the biggest overhaul we’ve ever made to our Assignments engine – just in time for your Spring classes!
What are Assignments?
“Assignments” refers to the built-in tracking system featured on PersonalFinanceLab. This system allows teachers to assign work for their students to do on the platform – from playing through the Budgeting Game (or making certain types of purchases while they play), to building their portfolio on the Stock Game, or completing lessons and taking quizzes in our curriculum library, and everything in between.
By creating an Assignment, teachers set start dates and due dates, and select which tasks they want their students to complete (be it actions in our Games or lessons and quizzes to complete). Teachers can even stack up assignments by using Prerequisites, or give students Rewards in either game if the assignments are completed on time.
The Assignments system is also used for the backbone of our Badges and Certificates.
So What’s New?
We have spent the last several months re-building our assignments engine from the ground up to meet the growing needs of teachers we work with every day.
Besides the back-end improvements in speed of reporting (particularly how fast a student can download their Certificates of Completion after finishing all requirements), there are a number of changes and improvements teachers can find this Spring:
Improved Assignment Editing
Assignments previously were “locked” to the dates you selected. Adding tasks to an Assignment after students already completed some of the required work could cause desynchronization of reports, or lost quiz progress.
The new Assignments engine separates the reporting from logging. This means you can make any edit to your Assignments at any time, and it will automatically update based on your new settings.
Not only does this make it easier to update your class settings as your classroom needs evolve, but it even allows changing grade requirements after students have already begun (for example, allowing students with particularly low scores to re-take quizzes, without impacting the rest of the class), or even creating an assignment in the past to see which students made certain actions before now.
Increased Assignment Limits
The new system’s logging and reporting features open a lot of possibilities for dense assignments. This includes a greater number of tasks allowed per assignment (formerly 100 tasks per assignment, now allows EVERY task simultaneously), but also a greater number of assignments per class (formerly capped at 20, now unlimited).
This gives much greater flexibility to non-profit organizations that wish to open up every task to students all in one go due to asynchronous learning, as well as hyper-focused teachers that like to create separate assignments for every class session.
The Assignments Reporting restrictions are also lifted, meaning large classes (150+ students) have access to the same reporting and export capabilities, without manual exports needed through their account managers.
Variable Retries
The previous version of our assignments system allowed teachers to grant “Retries” to quizzes that they included as part of their class assignment – but it limited to “None” or “Infinite” (with grades simply based on the last attempt of retries were allowed).
Tasks also needed to be individually toggled to be retried or not, a tedious process for assignments that might have dozens of tasks.
Our latest update instead introduces a new concept – “Allowed Attempts”. With Allowed Attempts, instructors can specify how many attempts are allowed on any given quiz – the system will report the highest grade a student achieved within the allowed number of attempts. “Allowed Attempts” is also set once for your entire assignment – no need to manually set this separately for every single quiz.
If a student continues to re-attempt the quiz, their grade on the Report Card will not update, but teachers can see any additional attempts when inspecting the Student Details.
Time Zone Support
Previously our assignments system was locked to US Eastern Time – despite other time restrictions being based on the time zone instructors select when creating their session.
This limitation has been removed with the new Assignments engine, ensuring precisely-set start and end dates are always exactly what instructors expect when setting up.
Multi-Language Support
Last, but definitely not least, is our full support for French and Spanish-language classes! Earlier in the Fall 2025 semester we released our translated content for our quizzes and budget game (with the stock game fully translated several years ago), but the assignment admin interface and reporting was still English-Only.
This update brings full translation across every element of the platform!
So When Can I Get It?
Our upgraded Assignments system is running in the background now – but not all of the features will be available until late January 2026 (with both the old system and new system running in parallel for testing purposes).
When the update is released, it will be applied retroactively to all existing assignments, with all the new features applied to existing assignments automatically.
Happy Learning!
-The PFinLab Team