Yes, this is the key thing. I feel like good questions can be good questions even if candidates see them. Especially if they make minor changes, so you can’t just blindly memorize the numbers. But if you can see a standard BF question and know how to plug in the numbers and calculate it, you have learned something.
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They also said on the call trial and error won’t get credit. I found this a bit weird. If you show how your trial and error works, that should be sufficient. There should be no reason to require you to use a quadratic equation to solve for an IRR or the missing Premium. When you can use functions like IRR or you just how the inputs = the outputs when determining the missing variable.
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Hell, I’ve taught loads of classes, and taken lots of classes, where all the final exam problems came word-for-word from quizzes, homeworks, and straight from the textbook [with the answers]
Now, those weren’t pass/fail situations, but plenty of people got Cs and Ds on those exams.
In any case, I assume they’ll be building up more questions on each sitting until they get a large enough question pool that this is all moot.
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Do they mean you can’t use Goal Seek in Excel?
[sorry, I don’t know what the CAS computer exam environment will be like. The FSA exams for this sitting have a dumbed-down version of Excel, iirc]
No the Pearson environment is not Excel but a similar environment with similar functionality.
I am literally talking about doing something like 100^x = ln(x) - 600
For example and just manually typing it in the X until you get both sides of the equation to work.
Usually the questions in CAS exam 9 they give you losses and expenses and ask you to price to an IRR or and underwriting profit and you are left with a quadratic. You have a pretty good idea of what the starting point of the premium needs to be. It takes literally thirty seconds to trial and error to get a very close answer, if not exact.
Trying to figure out how to write out and solve a quadratic equation in Excel is painful at best and would take much longer.
That seems silly. We all use solver in real life. Do you have a link to the official instructions that say that?
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…so, you’re saying that you don’t have the quadratic formula memorized…
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It was just an answer to the question from the VP of Admissions. Maybe she was incorrect. I imagine she doesn’t speak for every grader.
Anyway, I haven’t been trained on the SOA exams yet [as a grader], so I’m not sure what we allow/disallow yet.
I’m pretty sure there are supposed to be formulas in the cells, and not simply some value
I am saying a lot of questions are easier to solve by using a default input and then just using trial and error and carrying the variable to each calculation and then doing a quadratic at the end.
I mean, just guessing an answer out of the blue shouldn’t get credit. Setting up a formula and saying that x=1234 makes the formula true is completely different.
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Yes all the formulas are there. It’s really a question on what is defined as “showing your work” to get full credit.
Right that’s my point. She wasn’t entirely clear. It could be she would say that would be fine. But it definitely sounded like she was not suggesting people use trial and error.
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In a similar vein, the third semi-controversial thing she said was that she suggested writing out in the cells a string like Incurred = Case + Paid. So if you use the wrong cell for Paid by accident the graders know. I feel like for something so simplistic it should be a given that if you had an incorrect reference, that it was an incorrect reference. Basically, the “vibes” I got was the default is your answer will be incorrect. Always the question of whether the CAS grades up or down.
Meaning there are more points to lose in a question that actually exist in the question with making small errors. It has never been clear to me how graders grade questions. I would bet it’s a mix and dependent on how other students answer questions.
She also pointed out that graders can’t change your answers and that they get a read-only copy of the file. To me this is actually not good. If a grader can see that a different input immediately results in the right answer, you are more likely to get more points. So if I mess one feature you can see how it flows through to all the subsequent parts of the problem. The CAS claims they do not penalize for downstream effects but I don’t know if I believe this. I have seen enough failing grade reports to question that.
I’m tutoring some gr 11 and gr 12 students. It’s surprising that it just rolls right off the tongue after so many years.
You’d have thought integration by parts would’ve stuck as well but no such luck.
I think I still have it memorized.
I’m not exactly sure why I need it memorized…
I think its importance is greatly exaggerated. But whatever. Why do we memorize any formulas, amirite?
What, you don’t remember how to complete the square?
[back in the day, when you had to sit on your butt for at least 2 hours of the prelim exams before you could leave (they were 4-hr exams then), I re-derived formulas for a few things I remembered the conceptual definition for, but had forgotten the fairly simple formula (once I re-derived it) so I could check my answer on one question. It was Course 1, back in fall 2002… man, I feel old now]
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- There’s a limerick for the formula, btw:
From negative b, we may add
(or subtract—either one isn’t bad)
square root of “b’s square
minus 4ac.” There!
Divide all by 2a, and be glad.
[note: the above limerick sucks, but it’s better than the idiotic “Dr. Seuss” version I found]
- as for integration by parts, that’s even simpler than a quadratic formula, wtf dude
\int u dv = uv - \int v du
ffs, it’s just the product rule
d \left( u \cdot v \right) = u \cdot dv + v \cdot du
I mean, mathematical “tricks” are fun and all, they’re really not that important.
I remember when I first learned of the “proof” for the integral of sec(x), and I was like, “okay, that’s pretty ingenious, and whoever thought of it is a genius”. But it added nothing to my understanding of math, or my life for that matter, other than that momentous euphoric admiration.
Completing the square is kind of similar.
So you’re telling me that math (class) is hard.
Fair enough.