-
Glad I didn’t sit this time around. Not that I had time to study [I didn’t], but the really high pass rates of the past got corrected for. [Though 2 people I work with passed and made FCAS, so … there were glimmers of hope.]
-
Exam 7 was slightly above last time. 6-US was markedly down.
-
Historically, the fall exams have lower pass rates than the spring exams. If that holds, last year’s 42.1 for Exam 8 is going to turn into a mid-30s or [way] lower mark.
Post Exam Summary is now posted and the info given by the CAS seems hubristic but I am also pretty salty at having not passed despite feeling well prepared. It seems that if only the candidates would have prepared better, not that maybe this exam was too difficult, but again take my rant with a grain of salt.
• Performance was slightly less than anticipated on Domain A. Candidates lacked sufficient knowledge on exposure curves.
• Performance was slightly less than anticipated on Domain B. Candidates performed poorly when attempting to calculate the profitability of insurance policies.
• Candidates performed poorly on Domain C, particularly when it came to allocating capital and the applications of securitization of catastrophe risk. When asked to allocate capital, some candidates allocated assets instead of capital.
• Candidates did well on Domain D, particularly with analyzing insurance and financial risk quantitatively (task 2). Candidates struggled with understanding the underwriting cycle for this domain.
That better not happen since I am studying for 8 now
Could it be that unusually high pass rates for 7 and 9 (due to retakes from the 5/1 debacle) led to an abnormally high proportion of first-time attempters?
632 attempting doesn’t seem abnormally low in total, but probably relatively fewer than average would have been second attempts on exam 9.
I haven’t updated my exam stats file, which goes back to 2000. I do have a very crude estimate of how many people would have progressed into the next exam as a 1st-time taker vs. a repeat taker.
To really run this off, you’d have to go back and ask how many people in [exam] were 1st vs. 2nd+ takers, and how does that potentially impact pass rates? In theory, you’d expect 2+ takers to eventually pass and if that pool builds up enough a lot of them to pass, but I don’t recall the historical data bearing that out and it especially wasn’t true for 8, where a huge backup accumulated over years and pass ratios never really moved despite the backup.
1 Like
Yeah, maybe this effect isn’t as strong as I assumed it to be. Maybe the overall pass rate for first time takers is close to that of retakers. Based on personal experience, I only failed one exam (7) twice, so for me being a retaker represented a much higher level of preparedness. But the retaker cohort isn’t going to include all the superstars that go through the process and never fail.
In this case specifically, I view S24 as a first-time attempt for all 506 candidates, because the syllabus change was so significant. If a more typical 55% passed instead of 75%, then there should have been about 100 candidates that were borderline in '24 and would have a stronger than average chance in '25.