Blind Pretesting and Student Performance in an Undergraduate Corporate Finance Course

Using a unique sample of college students at a service academy, this paper explores whether the testing effect can be applied to an introductory corporate finance course. Prior research on the testing effect has analyzed non-quantitative subject matter. We introduce the testing effect to undergraduate finance and find evidence that administering a blind pretest at the beginning of the semester improves final exam performance at the end of the semester. This performance improvement occurs without grading the pretest or providing any feedback to students or instructors. Performance improves the most for average and below average students.