I agree 100%. I was going to comment that the format of some questions definitely was different, which you better explained in your #1. Also, I firmly believe I had a defective question part. If so, then I wasted valuable time here quadruple checking rather than potentially getting .25 or .5 pts somewhere else. Lastly, and this is more of just a general CAS exam complaint, but the point allocation still makes no sense to me. You have short answer questions that take 30 seconds to answer worth 1 point or something and then calculation questions that take 10 minutes only worth 1.5 points (made up the values, but you get my message).
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I hope that in light of all these issues the graders are a bit more lenient and make a downward adjustment to the pass mark. I believe they did this in 2018 after they acknowledged the exam was too long. Based on the sentiments here and on Reddit 90%+ of exam takers had similar comments on length and overall exam quality. I hope the graders do the right thing.
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Ditto on the defective question. I made sure to note that in the post exam survey.
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One other thing that I hope someone at the CAS sees:
If youâre going to provide a sample environment and tell us that these are the pages we will provide from the study guide, then you need to provide those exact pages. Why change it for the actual exam?
Also, the tables from the NCCI Retro circular as provided were terrible to use. You couldnât copy/paste it easily; you couldnât lock/hide rows or columns, and so doing a Table M search was ridiculously cumbersome. I genuinely would have preferred those zoomable PDFâs with tiny print rather than what was given.
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I think I know what question you are referring to. It certainly was a poor way to test the concept, and the fact that the CAS has a history of asking defective questions would lead to candidates wasting potentially significant time trying to figure it out.
If they had a history of never asking defective questions I think it might have been reasonable, but someone really didnât put themselves in the candidateâs shoes when they approved this question part.
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The NCCI popout that was in the spreadsheet format was absolutely horrible. It would have been much better in paper format. If theyâre updating questions to make use of the spreadsheet environment, then they need to also update the NCCI tables to make them more efficient to use than the paper format, not make it more cumbersome.
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I also believe I had a defective question subpart. I wrote down what I remembered about it at the end of the exam when they ask that stuff but I couldnât remember the question number, I just described which question it was.
Assuming we are all not missing something, how the hell does that defective question make it through their quality control process? So terrible. And like we all said, thereâs no way to get at how much time people may have wasted here. I also agree on the tables, the format they were provided in was so poor. I just hope a grading adjustment is made that makes this all fair. Ugh.
Remember when not publishing exams was supposed to help the CAS not have to write new potentially defective/unclear questions with every sitting?
Pepperidge_farms.jpg
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Someone probably just thought they were slipping in a clever question or something without thinking
I donât even know which question was defective.
You might not have gotten the question - there are various versions out there
According to the CAS the questions asked on the exam are similar to those that would have been asked on a pen and paper exam and have not been adjusted to reflect the computer based environment:
If you got a question that seemed too hard or had too many calculations itâs probably because you just didnât study hard enough to be at the level of readiness the CAS expects itâs candidates to attain /s
It OBVIOUSLY canât be true that the CAS gave out incorrect information that would materially impact the way a candidate would study. Theyâre just disappointed in your lack of ability to prepare. Just study harder next time!
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Wow why did they lie to us
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Iâm confident that one of those questions would have taken me a solid 30 minutes to work out by hand.
I discovered that you could use the pop up ncci table m spreadsheet like a spreadsheet so could hide columns and do whatever work I wanted to do on that. However I couldnât copy paste from the pop up one back to the exam question which was annoying. What was interesting is that when I popped up the table m spreadsheet again it kept what I had done. I wish cas would tell you these things rather than figuring it out haphazardly since this isnât meant to be a test on how to use excel
if only they could set up like a âtest environmentâ or something where we could practice using itâŚ
I kind of give up on these. Like the progress they make on these inefficiencies are too slow. I feel like a lot of us have tolerance for studying for 10 exams so we donât complain much but requiring 7 exams + other requirements for ACAS and 3 more really tough (for no reason) exam for FCAS is really ridiculous, comical even.
I get that we need to filter people out but by the time some of us get to ACAS, weâre married and have kids. Makes me think this system is a joke.
This is coming from a single guy who has no kids. I canât imagine doing this with kids.
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Providing the same pages would be too easy. How are we going to keep the value of the credential up if we canât fail 70% of candidates. \s
I wish they provide a more meaningful score report that show where each person stands among all candidates scoring wise and provide the score adjustment made for curving, etc.
Itâs such a black box approach that, we just take the results as is.
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