CAS Charging $100 for Practice Exams

Normally no. Expenses reimbursed for travel to the grading location. Probably more often than not, employers do not force them to take vacation days for that travel (hence pay their normal salary for it), but most of the grading time is at their own homes, evenings or weekends, unpaid. SOA exams are primarily a volunteer process.

Lol no we don’t.

The only thing that can come close is some gift card incentives for assessments. But if you convert that to an hourly rate, I’m sure it’s less than minimum wage.

Didn’t they pay CAS and/or CIA members to write the GI track exams? I’m not sure about the ongoing grading of those exams, but at least at first I would assume there’s a dearth of qualified GI actuaries who are willing to volunteer for the SOA.

Possibly. I don’t know. Anyway those are a very small subset of the SOA exams, and the general statement that “SOA graders are paid” is inaccurate.

1 Like

I always appreciated that I could request my exam answers for the EA exams before the grades were released, too. Don’t know why the SOA can’t do that, especially since everything is electronic now anyway.

1 Like

My understanding is that the FSA-level exams where people got paid to be involved in the exams (or modules) are/were SOA staff.

1 Like

Are all old CAS exams still available on their website? Like could you mimic taking a practice exam on your own? It’s been a few years since I sat for a fellowship exam, but it used to be you could just download a pdf of the previous exam with previous example model answers and away you went.

You can work the questions, but you can’t mimic the CBT environment. Sure, you can do the problems on your computer in Excel, but that’s not exactly what you get on testing day (at least, I don’t think it is).

Sounds like treason to me

I think it was mostly CIA members because the CAS members were (for some incredibly strange reason) not overwhelmingly eager to help out the organization that tried and was actively still trying to destroy CAS.

I am not going to write the specific people’s names, because that’s not the point, but there are two people on SOA education staff, listed for the General Insurance exams, and they’re both from Canada.

I assume they have more than just two people working on these exams.

I’m not sure they do. They only have a handful of people sitting for the exams, and two people could easily grade them all. And two people who are being paid for their time could easily write the exams, as well.

2 Likes

CIA members are generally also either SOA or CAS members. So a CIA member with enough general insurance knowledge to write exams is likely a CAS member as well.

It’s changing now but CIA membership used to be based on educational credentials from the SOA/CAS + other CIA-specific requirements.

I had heard the soa did pay people from cas/cia. i can think of two who bc of their choice to assist the soa I had heard were then shut out of cas volunteer roles (or at least the role that involved exams). one had contributed mightily to the cas education system already and been recognized for those efforts. the other i can think of was a many year volunteer who had long openly wished for combining into one org. i don’t know what role these folks eventually found within the soa system or how it was (or was not) paid, if it was ongoing, etc. I was pretty detached from the cas volunteer system at this point so knew names but not able to confirm. so read this as internet rumors.

Y’all. There is this thing called the Actuarial Directory (owned by the SOA), and you could search for people w/ CAS credentials whose employer happens to be called “Society of Actuaries”.

Just a thought. If you really want to find out who the people are.