I edited my post to address just that while you were responding:
i.e. If I magically became exam chairman tomorrow, I’d ask for the current people responsible to submit the exam to pare it down to as short a length as they possible can, and when they were done, I’d remove half of it.
Just noticed my blank grade report is back up after being gone, I wonder if they’re just removing/readding it every time they’re releasing an exam’s results.
I think this is arguing in favor of the bloomsy questions though, which everyone equally complains about.
Long time no see. Didn’t realize who was posting lol.
If the exam is shortened, this would make it a worse differentiator in my opinion.
I think it is fair to say that an extra hour is warranted. That is in fact why they added an hour for TBE initially. Because they don’t really care about time. They want everyone to finish.
The issue with blooms questions, is that every sitting they make the exams have a higher blooms level.
I think it’s at the point where it’s just too tricky. A year or two ago, it wasn’t as bad.
I imagine they didn’t add the extra hour in Pearson because of cost and availability. Probably harder to get seats for a 5 hour exam than a 4 hour. And the main goal was making sure everyone gets to take an exam.
I think that’s just novelty. The people two years ago were complaining equally as much, once you’ve seen the problem and done it in your own house it’s not so bad and you study things similar to it. This is why the CAS isn’t publishing exams anymore.
We complain about Bloomsy questions specifically in conjuction with the amount of time they take and how bad the CAS is at estimating that time.
A lot of the Blooms questions can be answered very quickly if you know exactly what the question writer is asking of you. But this is rarely the case. If the exam was full blooms but also much much shorter so that people have time to consider all the implications of a question before racing away down a wrong fork, I don’t think it would be nearly as much of an issue.
Have you taken exam 9 yet? It is by far the worst in that exam.
I have taken two exam 7s, two exam 8s, and two exam 9s. It has definitely gotten worse.
The algebra ones are mostly ridiculous as well.
I probably passed exam 7 two years ago because I figured out that Broscious and Cape Cod question. I will say that neither question added really value to knowledge. They were just plugging and chugging and backing into things for 15 minutes each. Essentially very hard algebra puzzles.
I think we’re sort of arguing both sides of the issue though. On one hand we don’t want it to be algorithmic because that doesn’t represent a real actuary, fine so the questions are made more critical thinking but we don’t like critical thinking because some might get it quite quickly. Short of simply increasing the % passing I’m not sure how the CAS could solve all these concerns.
To me the question is whether you are testing critical thinking or just IQ (smarts).
The CAS questions often don’t focus on level of understanding but more on manipulation and convoluted scenarios they drew up.
This is not testing actual knowledge, IMO. That is my problem with it.
Howdy.
How so? If the current 20 question exam was pared down to just 10 questions, how would it be worse? If the exam was only 1 brehm question instead of three, and one Venter question instead of 2…etc. Everyone would have enough time to fully respond and demonstrate whether or not they know how to answer such problems. It becomes a much better differentiator. Yes I agree that in all likelihood doing so would probably flip pass rates so that instead of the current 30% pass rate we have it would be closer to 70%, but again that’s just to my point. I don’t see the people who would pass under the alternate scenario as any less of a qualified actuary then those who pass under the current scenario.
It’s crazy to me that it’s seen as acceptable to have 10 exams with 30% pass rates. We wouldn’t expect someone who has passed 9 30% pass rate exams to only have a 30% chance at passing the final one. It’s almost as if the test that we are using is doing very little to update our Bayesian prior on whether or not the candidate is qualified…
For example, exam 8 a few years ago threw out a bunch of triangles to do one of the smoothing out methods mentioned in Shapland. Most people got this wrong because they didn’t realize the CAS gave the wrong triangles on purpose and that you need to do weird manipulation to get to paid triangles from incurred.
Instead of testing actual knowledge they focused on exam 5 manipulation embedded in the question. They could have asked the question in a bunch of different ways that would have focused on knowledge of pearson residuals and what not.
I agree on the latter concern, I think it’s in conflict with the former though.
I can definitely find examples where the CAS seems to focus too much on testing algebra (an IQ on a recent exam 8 sitting comes to mind), although I think that’s a bit of them just trying to blend multiple concepts into one problem. The notion that they’re IQ tests doesn’t really resonate with me though because a proper IQ test doesn’t require lots of knowledge going in and these exams are the opposite of that, they’re just adding some critical thinking to the extreme studying.
Bloody actuarial students getting so wasted between sittings they learn nothing
To me what bothers me is when you can study a 1000 hours for an exam and not have much of an advantage over someone who studies 200 hours and just is much smarter than you.
I don’t think that’s true, unless the person doing 1,000 hours didn’t spend them nearly as effectively as the 200. For example a common studying mistake is to keep reviewing the stuff you know and never really mastering the stuff you don’t know.
I can send you my detailed notes on exam 9. I think you would see that this is not the case.
“I think we’re sort of arguing both sides of the issue though. On one hand we don’t want it to be algorithmic because that doesn’t represent a real actuary, fine so the questions are made more critical thinking but we don’t like critical thinking because some might get it quite quickly. Short of simply increasing the % passing I’m not sure how the CAS could solve all these concerns.”
Who’s we? If you can get through a critical thinking portion quickly, good for you! I would have the test centered around where the median student can finish it in 2 hours, spend an hour checking their work, and then twiddle their thumbs until the end. And that the 99th percentile can finish in ~3.5 hours and spend half hour checking the important stuff. If this results in a higher pass rate, that simply would prove my hypothesis that the current system is artificially keeping pass rates low. See my previous post about pass rates.