Exam 7 is my last exam. I’ve been working on the Pricing side since I started my career so I find this exam very challenging. I am looking to see how people study for this exam. Do you read source material or spend more time working on the past problems?
Also, my prior exam 8 doesn’t require using a lot of Excel formulas while for 7, I heard more complex formulas can be used to help save sometime like LINEST , INDEX etc. But I am not sure which formulas can be used at Pearson testing center. So hope that someone can help share some formulas that you think are useful and allowed to use on the actual exam.
For 7 I used the CF/RF seminar and the RF Cookbook, both of which I thought were great and highly recommend. After going through CF videos I primarily focused on working problems, since there is a good amount of calculation heavy material and saved memorization type stuff (ex: Brehm) for the last month or so before the exam.
In terms of formulas, I didn’t use any complex functions while working problems but definitely found that excel made working problems quicker. CAS published a document at one point showing the mapping of excel functions to Pearson function names, but all of the functions I used while working problems were the same between both.
Thank you for the suggestion! I used CF for 8 (just the cookbook itself) and feel like his manual is very formular driven. Does the CF/RF seminar provide some sort of explanation for topics? I guess practicing problems seems to be a good strategy for this exam as past questions appear pretty straight forward, not very tricky like 8 and 9.
I think the main roadblock with using functions is going to be your familiarity. Pearson doesn’t provide any context clues, so you either know from memory what the inputs are, or you have to pull up the HELP pdf on the computer and search for the function to find out the parameters. At which point you’ve probably wasted too much time anyway.
I was on the same boat: 0 experience in reserving, but I found exam 7 questions to be the most straight forward among fellowship exams, and it’s the only exam where I didn’t read through all source material. I don’t get why people are recommending those complex Excel functions. To solve the liner regression problem, all you need is INTERCEPT and SLOPE. They are much more intuitive and I used them at Pearson testing center.