Assuming you had no technical issues. Alot of people had to file grievances due to the application not working at times. It happened to me as well and I’d say I lost at least 20 minutes on 7 as a result. Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the grievance form.
I hope all of us who do complain about the CAS (including myself) volunteer when we get our FCAS’s. Otherwise it’s like complaining about politics while choosing not to vote IMO.
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I will gladly volunteer when I can. I agree that criticism without action is unhelpful.
I want to volunteer but just write easy questions
I don’t understand this complaint. Do you want to change the testing window forever based on this year running late? Who is injured by the testing window being in May? No one is stopping you from studying now.
I used to start studying a week after I sat for my exam. I had small children when I took my upper exams, my husband also had a full-time job, and it was hard to schedule study time. So I sat for an exam, took a week off, and then started gearing up for the next one.
Assume you passed. Study for your next exam. If you passed, just keep going. If you failed, well, surely you don’t need more than 3 months to study for an exam you’ve already studied for. It’s not as if there are any major syllabus changes this year. And when you do get around to the next exam, you’ll have a leg up.
It’s incompetence on my part. I acknowledge that. That being said, I’m actually quite competent at writing exam questions, compared to the average actuary. People are imperfect, and this is a small profession that doesn’t have enough candidates to fund more than a tiny handful of full-time educators. Building an exam bank is going to mitigate this issue, anyway. So the CAS is actively working to solve this problem, in a way that I expect will work.
I can give several reasons off the top of my head:
- they aren’t harder on a relative basis – the % who pass is actually more than it was in my time, and I don’t think the current crop of candidates is a lot more talented.
(There’s much better 3rd party study material now than in the past, which allows the same candidates to learn more in the same amount of time, and quite possibly to learn it better.) - There’s more material than in the past. This is a small field that’s seen enormous growth in its domain knowledge. Just because the complete actuary now needs to know how to do GLMs doesn’t mean the complete actuary no longer needs to understand the basics of reserving a commercial auto book.
- The Board has asked that exams be geared to higher Bloom’s level problems. That makes for harder problems.
- What we used to complain about in my day wasn’t “Bloomsy problems” but irrelevant problems based on footnotes. The CAS has gotten much better at keeping exam items on-topic and related to a learning objective. (Hey, I helped write the first set of learning objectives – they didn’t HAVE learning objectives when I sat for exam, just a syllabus you had to “master”.) You don’t see those weird irrelevant questions, because when study aid writers collect and curate old exam problems, they toss them away along with the questions on topics that have been removed from the syllabus.
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Thanks for taking the time to respond. I think we see #2 slightly differently but I understand your perspective. The one thing I’ll push back on is #3 (i). I don’t mean to undermine your credentials but the pre-2011 exams were alot easier (in my opinion). Anyone who has prepared for exams in the last decade has seen those questions and is able to compare/contrast.
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I acknowledged that the questions were easier on older exams. So I’m not sure why you are disagreeing with me. I just gave you a bunch of reasons other than malice or “trying to limit the number of actuaries” that explained how that came to be.
Keep in mind, though, that all of the study resources we are all using were developed with those old exam questions in mind. So in hindsight they are going to look a lot easier. Honestly, I think the Bloomsy questions are far more relevant than the “footnote” type questions. While the Integrative Questions are really difficult and can be very tricky, I think they do a much better job at testing critical thinking. Are there sometimes unfair trick questions? Of course. But critical thinking is what we should be trying to test, not memorization, because that’s what we are supposed to be using day to day.
Ok. I actually don’t mind having more material and I actually think the one thing the CAS does a good job on selecting the syllabus. I personally think that the wording has become more obscure and that it’s hard to tie that back to the syllabus or materials. I also thought Blooms was the right choice. By nature, I suppose it does open the door to more ambiguity and less consistency. The IQs were a good idea but I think that context is critical. Asking someone to solve a problem like that under such severe time constraints isn’t testing acumen or actuarial competence. It’s more of a pure IQ test. It also induces additional stress that wasn’t a factor in the past (especially the dense wording of those questions and how long it takes to read). You can understand the material really well and not be able to solve IQs under time constraints.
I’ve taken uppers with IQs. I get it’s a lot at once… but for the most part it’s just lots of topics asked in one question in multiple parts. The notion that it’s an IQ test is extreme. The closest the exams get to that is where they take a core concept and ask it in a way they haven’t before which can test IQ in that someone who didn’t have the depth of knowledge may be able to figure it out on their feet, but another candidate could have just deeper knowledge of the material and done fine. So yeah IQ might help for people bouncing within % points of the pass mark but it’s far and away based on a huge commitment of studying.
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Let me qualify that statement. You certainly need to have the depth of knowledge. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the term IQ that loosely. What I was getting at it is that some people are just built for test taking and it suits them. IMHO, the average actuarial candidate who understands that material will take alot of time to solve those problems which eats away at time for the rest of the exam.
Gotta disagree with this. High-stakes testing is stressful by its nature. And the stakes are pretty much the same as they’ve always been.
Hell, I once had a multiple choice question (from the SoA) with a typo. It was a fairly hard problem to calculate. I was CERTAIN I knew what to do, and the right answer wasn’t one of the options. I did it three times before deciding to just pick the answer closest to what I had calculated and move on. I wasted a lot less time than most people, judging from the comments after-the-fact. At least with open-answer questions you can always make a case for your answer.
I hated the multiple choice nature of the OCs. Every question is a game of finding the absolute most correct in a sea of almost corrects.
I will give exam 9 example from 2019. The 2019 question from Bodoff basically crosstabs the usual version of a table and it was a challenging question that basically made you try to think of how to convert the table into the non-cross tabbed version of it.
When the CAS has basically not tested half the material on the paper. So they made a puzzle question that doesn’t really give a better understanding of the material instead of actually testing the paper.
Can someone who knew the Bodoff paper cold get this question wrong? Probably yes. And someone who only know part of the paper but be good at puzzles get this right? Probably, yes as well.
To me focusing on puzzles instead of understanding is sometimes lost with these questions.
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The waiting is getting unbearable IMO
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And I’ve been waiting waaaaayyyy less than you all have!
Does anyone know if something will be released tomorrow? No one mentioned an email.
Skol I’ve been waiting over 8 weeks
We will see something when we see something, even if it’s next week at the earliest 