The $725 exam fee can’t include this? Why is it $100 for each practice exam when the marginal cost is next to $0? How much is going to Pearson for this? How on earth is that cost justifiable?
Every CAS exam until recently were published for free. Every FCAS involved who approved this decision benefitted from that policy. Something seems fundamentally broken among how CAS leadership makes decisions. I get the impression that the biggest benefactor of this is PearsonVue.
Yes, right now they say all the practice exams are from the previously released exams, but does anyone have any faith that this will remain the case 5-10 years in the future? Will the CAS periodically release sample exams so that students can be better prepared for what the exam actually looks like, as opposed to what it was in 2019? The lack of communication and transparency is extremely worrying.
Are there any CAS board members that are willing to discuss kind of decision making openly?
This is absurd. I just checked, and I can take full online practice tests for the LSAT and GMAT for free. The AICPA offers free sample exams online that “are not complete, four-hour exam sections, each sample test gives you a selection of [questions] … as they would appear on the real exam.”
There is no excuse for the CAS to charge $99 on top of a registration fee for this.
I don’t understand what you are saying. Are they asking people to pay $99 to take practice exams in a CBT environment, and all the questions they will face are already released and available to them?
I heard they were going to make practice exams available. And i said, “that’s great!” Then i heard they were charging for them, and considered it a potential profit center. Even so, i had no idea they were going to be so expensive.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it’s crazy how expensive the exams are on both sides of the CAS/SOA divide these days. I think my first exam cost $100. There’s been some inflation since then, but not 625%. And anything from the societies used to be a free download or a nominal fee to get it printed & mailed to you.
All the SOA pre-ASA exams except PA are still under $500. P (and FM), which would be most comparable to the first exam most of us took, is $250. Exam PA is over $1000, and there are some other ASA requirements that aren’t traditional exams which are over $1000. Total for reaching ASA is certainly much higher now than when I did (1973?).
I don’t think exam P was $100 for me, but it wasn’t terribly prohibitive for an unemployed me living in NYC to take it. Maybe it was $300 or something.
Hopefully most of the people sitting this exam will be able to get the company to pay for it. It would be a brave candidate that elected not to take the practice exams.
If I had all the questions available free, I wouldn’t consider my own money for the CBT environment, especially since these days I surely would have taken some CBT exams.
I wonder if we’re picking up some of the downsides of having merged with the SOA, without the benefits…or the, you know, merger.
(I actually don’t mind the idea of recouping any incremental costs for a practice exam…although I’d think it’d be better to include one practice session within the cost of the exam. However, I’m skeptical that the incremental cost is $20.)
Even so, i had no idea they were going to be so expensive.