CAS Active Exam Window Posting Guidelines

Exams - Study Groups and Discussion CAS General
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PLEASE TAKE NOTE

Here are some guidelines to follow when posting on GoActuary during an active sitting session for Exams.

  1. People who have seen an actual CAS Exam (starting 2020 and later) should never talk about specific items from those Exams; and
  2. Having seen a current Exam, candidates should refrain from talking about specific syllabus materials in any way until the testing window for that Exam has ended.

So, for Exams that are administered for only a single day, please refrain from any specific discussion until after 5pm Eastern Time (US) of the testing day to further discuss syllabus material.

For Exams that have a testing window greater than 1 day, we are utilizing an honor system in that candidates that have not sat for the current Exam can ask seek answers to questions about syllabus material.

Our request that everyone who responds to such questions should simply answer the question posed without offering “advice” on whether or not a particular topic is likely to be tested or not. (Note that such advice can be given outside of an active testing window for the Exam.)

SPECIFIC INFORMATION FOR FALL 2020

We have heard that due to COVID pandemic restrictions, some candidates may still be sitting for these Exams (including MAS-I and MAS-II, the single day Exams this sitting) until the end of 2020. Therefore, we request that anyone who has sat for any CAS Exams (or have seen the Exams through grading, or writing, or any other way) refrain from discussing anything on the syllabus until the testing window is finally closed. A clear sign of this will be that this special 2020 section will be deleted from this OP.

Keep in mind that what you might find as an innocuous statement about syllabus material may turn out to be unintentionally disclosing actual Exam material. The advice of the GoA moderators is that it’d be just too risky that you might inadvertently reveal more than is appropriate; so please avoid it.

Also, we’d like to remind candidates that they signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) regarding the Exam itself during registration, and they should never reveal information about the specific exam questions they saw. In this regard, using GoA as a platform to create a crowd-sourced Preliminary Answer Key (aka PAK) as this is seen as a violation of the NDA and those threads will be deleted.

Going forward, we do not anticipate closing down the Exam sections. Note that repeated violations of the posted expectations can result in consequences that impact your posting privileges in other areas on GoActuary.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we figure out what the new Exam environment entails as well as we–the moderators–learn more about the functionality of this new platform.

GOOD LUCK!

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I would just like to emphasize that, in accordance with the NDA exam candidates must sign, this part of Vorian_Atreides instructions remains true at all times, not just during exam administration windows.

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Thanks - this looks very reasonable.

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:tup:

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The first rule about cas exam club is you do not talk about… :slight_smile: I guess commenting on difficulty level or the quality of test Center equipment is ok :stuck_out_tongue:

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So long as information about syllabus material isn’t part of the post and the comment is about the Exam overall, that is fine.

To illustrate:
CAS Exam 5 is on Ratemaking and Reserving. Before CAS stopped releasing Exams, every ratemaking exam had a high-point problem that covered the entire indication (i.e., the ratemaking section) of the syllabus. I assume that this is still the case (no one should comment to verify or deny this statement).

Saying “That was a very difficult Exam, harder than the one I took last sitting (that I got a 5 on)” would be fine. Saying “That ratemaking problem was a bitch!” would not be fine.