Praxis Economics (5911)

The Praxis Economics (5911) test is developed and administered by ETS. It assesses the economics knowledge an entry-level secondary teacher needs, and its content is based largely on the Council for Economic Education's Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics.

Because calculators are not permitted, any arithmetic on the test is designed to be done by hand: percentages, simple fractions, areas of triangles and rectangles, and multipliers built from friendly numbers. Your score is based on the number of questions you answer correctly, so there is no penalty for guessing; answer every question.

Microeconomics alone accounts for nearly half the test, and together the two larger categories make up about 80%. Plan your study time roughly in proportion, but do not skip the fundamentals: opportunity cost, marginal analysis, and the PPC reappear inside many micro and macro questions.

With 120 minutes for 110 questions, you have about 65 seconds per question. A practical plan is to work at about one question per minute, which banks roughly 10 minutes for flagged questions at the end.

• Graph reading and graph reasoning: identifying shifts versus movements, finding new equilibria, and reading areas such as consumer surplus, deadweight loss, and profit.
• Cause-and-effect chains: tracing a policy or shock through a model, for example from an open market purchase to interest rates, investment, aggregate demand, output, and the price level.
• Hand calculations: opportunity cost, elasticity, profit, GDP and inflation measures, multipliers, and real versus nominal values.
• Applied concepts: recognizing a concept in a short scenario, such as a public good, a type of unemployment, or a dominant strategy.
• Institutions: the structure and tools of the Federal Reserve, antitrust laws, regulatory agencies, and forms of business organization.