My sister passed all 4 parts in one sitting in her senior year in college. She’s not like a genius or anything. It was one sitting spread over something like 2 days. I don’t know if it’s the same now since this was years ago, but almost nobody is passing 4 actuarial exams in one sitting.
She went to Pace, which I think is a good school to teach for the CPA exam though.
Unless it’s changed since I was in high school (which is possible) the AB exam covers Calc I and BC covers Calc II. Even that’s not necessarily exact, but close.
The course “College Algebra” has come to mean “algebra that you need to know before taking a real college math class”.
It’s offered at many (most?) colleges as a remedial course. The course number at colleges I’ve seen starts with a 0, which indicates it is a high school level course.
The name confuses both high school and college kids, apparently.
Huh, I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t looked recently.
Geez, when I was in college :heynow: everyone, even the English Lit majors, had to take Calculus.
I’m guessing this was unique to your college, rather than because of your age. They didn’t at mine.
Oh, you could take a philosophy class instead, but most folks who tried it said it was even harder than Calculus.
philosophy or calculus? Are they even related? At my college you had to take either philosophy or religion.
You had to have a course in “logical thinking”. It wasn’t just any philosophy course; it was a particular course.
But Pre-Calculus didn’t meet the requirement and College Algebra certainly didn’t. I don’t even think the College Algebra credits counted towards the 128 credit hour requirement needed for graduation.
At one time, I taught two different algebra courses at a college, for the purposes of the students’ learning the material that was tested on a standardized entrance exam for the “real” college math courses. One exam was for math-intensive majors, like Business or STEM. The other exam was for the “softer” majors that required either an intro Stat course or the “Math for Dummies”-equivalent General Ed course.
The preliminary exam was required in order to get in to the various “college-level” math courses. Failing the exam meant you took a class that I and several other Master’s candidates taught. It was an interesting mix of competencies, from “just didn’t respect the prelim exam” to “totally lost in all things math, but I want to be an Engineer.”
The main reason these exams and courses exist was that many of the departments at the university (Business, CS, Engineering) are impacted – too many students, not enough classes. In an attempt to reduce the number of fails in the required and full classes (which means other eligible students could have taken and passed the class in their place) due to not being prepared, the classes and exams prepare them.
Anywho, my fading college memories are jarred in the hippocampus whenever I read about someone who has (relatively) no math background thinking about becoming an actuary.
It is tricky because you can be a very smart person, but only so so at math, or even poor at math…
This is partially because math is in some ways like another language you have to start learning from a young age. If you do not have a good foundation from grade school, even, it can make it hard or impossible to catch up with later.
To OP: often, taking classes less advanced than calculus in college is a signal that your foundation is not good, leaving the actuarial exams are out of reach. It doesn’t necessarily mean that, but it is something to think hard about.
That is technically correct that BC Calculus covers both Calc I and II, but the top STEM programs only give you the chance to (possibly!) place out of Calc I. (and no possibility of placing out of Calc I due to AB Calc). They’re typically very strict about giving credit for math & science courses, and for good reason. And even then you’re actually highly discouraged from skipping ahead, in order to have a stronger foundation. [I ignored that advice and skipped ahead to Calc II anyway, and I do think it was a mistake. It ultimately doesn’t matter, but first semester of freshman year could have been less painful]
Are there other schools & programs that are more lax about giving credit? I bet. If it’s a history of philosophy or something student that took AB calculus and will never need to see calculus again and just wants that credit? Sure! But if it’s someone that’s going to go on to higher math the strong foundation is very important.
It’s been a while. My recollection was that Miami only let you out of Calc II if you got a 5 on the BC exam AND placed into Calc III on the university’s math placement test. So very few people went straight into Calc III. Not very many people went straight into Calc II either, but that was more common. I think a 5 on AB or a 3 or 4 on BC placed you into a regular Calc II class.
They did, however, have a special Calc II course that was an extra credit hour (5 credit hours instead of the standard 4) and they used the extra time to include a review of Calc I… essentially at 5x the normal Calc I pace in recognition that we’d already taken Calc I but needed to solidify it a bit. That’s where a lot of the “smart” STEM kids landed, including me. I’d only taken a year of Calculus in high school, and the quick review definitely solidified my foundation.
There was also an Honors Calculus course where you couldn’t test out of it no matter what. I think I went to like 1 or 2 classes and didn’t like it so I switched to the 5 hour Calc II class which was a much better fit for me.
You had to write papers and stuff in the Honors class and I didn’t want to do that.
Very interesting! Any success stories of the “totally lost in all things math, but I want to be an Engineer" variety?
Note OP: these would still be success stories of students that (eventually) took the proper courses, not trying to self teach themselves Calculus. It is certainly NOT too late to learn, but it does need to be learned in proper stages. You can’t cram calculus, you need a proper foundation.
MIT is an example of a school that’ll give you an opportunity to skip Calc I if you get a 5 on BC calc and do well on their internal placement test. There is no credit for anything less than a 5 on BC calc and there is no opportunity to skip Calc II at all.
And lest you think that MIT is an outlier (even among top rated programs), here’s a more extreme example with CalTech!
CalTech doesn’t let you skip anything! Everyone takes mathematics placement tests for grouping purposes, but all freshmen take “freshman mathematics”. The “weakest” math group meets more times per week, it looks like the goal is simply to catch them up to everyone else.
But hey, they’re not “centers for actuarial excellence”, so who cares what their policies are right.
I taught about 800 students, so…maybe? No one ever came back to thank me, like in the movies.
@justin37, I see that you already have gotten a lot of good advice in this thread but wanted to provide my input as someone who has both recently hired entry level employees and recently completed exams.
You don’t need to go to a center for actuarial excellence or major in actuarial science to be an actuary. You do need to very strong in math, and one thing that I have always looked for on resumes was that the candidate was in a quantitative major. I think you will struggle even finding an internship with a general education major. Quantitative majors include things like math, physics, data science, etc. I would consider an Economics major if the applicant listed a lot of math courses on their resume, or other evidence of math like course load.
Regarding exams, I think you are setting yourself up for failure in taking exams if you haven’t completed Calculus I, II, and III at a college level at a minimum. You can probably pass the first couple (P and FM) without these classes but you will really struggle to understand underlying concepts for the upper level exams later on. Also, this educational background helps you to understand how to learn the problem solving needed to self study. The ACTEX study manual for exam P is good and fairly inexpensive if you are looking for a starting point. Although the SOA does have a plan to change the format of the first couple of exams, that has not gone into place yet so the recommendation to start with exam P still holds. You can always look at beanactuary.org to get a better understanding of the process.
It sounds like the majors that your school offers are fairly limited in relationship to your interests, so I would look into transferring and spend some time talking to your academic counselor. If you want to be an actuary or a math teacher, you are likely looking at more than four years of college to get through the necessary coursework based on the background you have described. I think you should also consider something like an Information Technology major (does your school offer this?). Others have correctly pointed out that Accounting could be a good option as it does not require the same calculus background if you are interested in pursuing an accounting career.