Tomorrow’s announcement will be an interesting one. I’m wondering if folks will take a back up exam or retake the same exam, etc.
I wonder how folks who retake their exam given they were able to complete it will feel if by chance their first attempt was actually a pass but they gave it up to retake and it possibly not be a pass.
I also don’t understand how this is fair for others that sat prior to May 1st. The May 1st group was at a severe disadvantage, but now the tables are turning. Such a weird weird weird sitting.
You need content experts to write the questions and the answer keys. There are no content experts outside the CAS. I mean, maybe the IFoA, but that’s not very different.
The CAS has already gotten out of actually administering the exams. They sold that to Pearson.
And they hire educational specialists to work with the actuaries from time to time.
So I’m not sure what you expect them to do differently.
I’ve yet to run into a person who’s not a member of the CAS Board or part of the Syllabus and Exam Committee who says “the exam system the CAS has? It’s great, it’s top-notch, it’s excellent, it’s practically a world-class standard, it’s fantastic at identifying the actuaries of the future.” The best I can get it “it sucks, but it’s the best we’ve got right now.” I don’t know why in 2024 after years of talking about evolution and The Actuary Of Tomorrow, we have to keep settling for mediocre.
The question becomes: how do we get better, and are we willing to accept the cost (either in terms of financial cost, or in terms of surrendering some control)?
A good potential exercise would be to consider the following questions:
Are the SOA’s and FIoA’s exams better than the CAS’s?
If so, how are they better (and could they be improved)?
What would be involved in incorporating that “betterness” into the CAS exam system?
Are we willing to make such changes?
EDIT: I don’t have informed opinions on the first two items. I suspect there’s a “yes” in the first item, but that’s more “grass is always greener” and scars I bear from my exam experience than an objective view.
EDIT²: I should also clarify that that sequence of questions is geared towards administering exams / imparting and validating knowledge. While I could nitpick, I think the material covered by the CAS curriculum is pretty good.
Because it’s a small profession, and the intersection between
People who know the material well enough to be useful
People who know enough about testing and credentialing to be useful
People willing to spend the time working on the system
Is extremely small, and probably inadequate for the excellence.
I’m sympathetic with requests to improve the system, and certainly to complaints about actual fuck-ups. But i don’t think it’s terrible in general, and i think expecting it to be superb is grossly unrealistic.
There’s also tension between the people who believe in education and in training. They are different. Do you want to train future actuaries to execute specific tasks or do you want to educate them more generally so they can solve new problems? Or some of each?
South Africa and Japan also have exam-based systems that are different from the US systems. (India and China have systems very similar to the British and the American systems.)
Personally, i like the UK exams more than the CAS ones, and the SOA ones less. YMMV.
But both are larger and have more resources than the CAS, and are attempting to do something very similar. So it certainly makes sense for the CAS to copy what looks good from them.
And this is why it’s never going to get any better. Hell, I’d settle for just “above average.” I don’t think we’re even average despite years of supposed improvements.
That’s a rant probably better suited for another thread.
I want the entire education system to do the latter. I think the exam system purports to do the latter, but in fact favors candidates who do the former.
I should have framed the first point as “do other actuarial organizations have exams/education systems better than the CAS’s”…but the point remains: if repeated eff-ups with CAS exams beg for improvements, it’s probably time to look outside the CAS, see what other organizations do, and see what can be learned, and whether good ideas could be incorporated into the CAS E&E system.
(On that last point…I don’t see a good resolution. If they were to give all candidates a second chance, then the May 1 candidates go back to being disadvantaged…plus the added competition for whatever spots are available for the test center will add to the clusterf–k.)
if an unaffected person laments that the affected people get 2 chances to pass i disagree. the unaffected person had one chance, the affected person has had 0 so far. there are plenty of practice problems around - all they saw (if they saw it at all) is more practice problems. do they get 2 more weeks of prep? maybe, assuming that helps. there was no guarantee it would happen and they had a heart attack-inducing event on the original game day.
if the concern of an impromptu retake being unfair to those for whom pearson worked stopped the retake idea, then that’s bonkers.
I’m not involved with exams these days, so I cannot evaluate whether the following is an accurate concern…but the complaint being raised follows the following logic:
Questions for individual exams are now being drawn from question pools.
The question pools are currently rather shallow.
Some candidates are therefore likely to see at least some of the same questions as they encountered during their 1 May attempt.
If that’s not accurate, then (again, with the caveat that I’m not involved with exams) the following could be reasonable concerns on the subject of fairness:
If the questions for the second chance administration are taken from some “backups”… the CAS does have a history of being inconsistent in the difficulty/quality of exam questions.
If the questions for the second chance administration are really just the original questions “tweaked”, then the candidates sitting for the second chance administration will still have the advantage of knowing what they need to focus on between now and their new test date, and of having potentially formed strategies for the questions, giving them an advantage.
Even if the tests are different and totally fair, the CAS will be taking the highest of the 2 marks giving the MayDay candidates 2 chances to pass while everyone else only has one. Therefore, I would hope the CAS takes that into account when deciding who passes.
One additional element to the mess: There are quite a few candidates in Québec. CAS exams are no longer offered in Québec due to the language laws there. To retest, those students will have to travel…again.
To the extent the pass mark is set by student performance (and in theory, it isn’t, unless student performance convinced them they misjudged the exam) i assume they will base it in the performance of students who had a normal sitting, and not ones who had a catastrophe followed by a second chance.
Aren’t there a couple more of new exams too. Didn’t the syllabus change significantly for the upper levels. In which case the exam test bank is probably pretty shallow on those.