Life of an actuary: Yet another Friday evening with no social life.
One week left.
Howâs everyone feeling?
I saw on the CAS website that starting this sitting, questions will be in random order (for all exams). Am I interpreting that correctly?
Candidate FAQ | Casualty Actuarial Society âWhat changes can I expect to see for the Spring 2021 sitting?â
Itâs hard to know what they mean by ârandom.â
The order of questions in the past exams were also random in the sense that it did not follow the order of the syllabus. Correct me if im wrong.
edit:
Is it possible for each exam taker to have questions shuffled and thatâs what they meant?
Ah I bet youâre right. It says âthe order of questions will be randomly presented within the various sections of the syllabusâ so maybe it will still be in syllabus order in terms of sections A, B, ⌠but like within section A each candidate will get the questions in a random order? I could see it being a measure to prevent cheating, since it makes talking about specific question numbers during the testing window impossible.
This makes the most sense to me. Remembering back to the prelims that have been computer based forever, they still generally followed the syllabus structure.
hi howâs it going everyone
Other thread pointed out scores are up on the CAS site now. Iâm still annoyed. Could not have gotten more of a 5:
eta: I would have considered Financial Reporting and Taxation to be my weakest section without a score reportâŚso that makes this even weirder.
Which exams did you take in the past? Fall 2019 and Fall 2020?
Did you get 5 on both tries?
From doing past exams and self grading, I find that itâs very easy to lose points here and there (.5, .75, 1, etc) on each question in this exam. These add up very quickly and so even if you answer every question âcomfortably,â you could still get a 4 or 5.
Based on the examiner reports, failing to use certain words/phrases would cost some points on some questions which sucks.
Yeah. I actually also took Spring 19 right after my daughter was born. I was massively underprepared but didnât want to waste the sitting. Got a 3 and donât really count it as an actual attempt. Only had read COPLFR if I recall.
I wonder if CAS has increased the number of questions since itâs CBT. For those that took it last sitting, did you feel like CBT helped a lot with saving time?
For exam 5, I thought it helped tremendously and I wouldnât be surprised if this time Exam 5 will have more questions.
I ran out of time last sitting and wasnât able to finish 1 question. I will add though that I practiced less in Excel last time (this sitting I exclusively used excel) and definitely felt some element of COVID fatigue. Maybe some time is saved being CBT. I donât think itâs as significant as what youâd expect with 5, just given the material is more written response and less calculations.
Best of luck everyone!
Good luck everyone!! Gonna be hitting the 1 page summaries pre-exam
Tomorrowâs my day, excited to just be done 
guys , which study manual is the best for exam 6 ? planning to take this fall
I think it depends on your learning style. Iâve heard good things about Casual Fellow. TIA is not the best but itâs alright. Both of those have videos. I personally really liked BattleActs but it isnât for everyone. It summarizes, organizes, and prioritizes the material really nicely with Wiki-style articles, flashcards, and calculation templates. No videos though. I also listened to most of the TIA videos, but it was pretty dry and I struggled to stay engaged. Lmk if you want to know more about either of those
Thanks. I used TIA for exam 8 and it works pretty well, credit to the instructor Josh. Not sure if the instructor for exam 6 is as good as himâŚ
I did like Battle Acts as you can do it in bite-size chunks. I donât get as much value out of videos (TIA) as I like working at my own pace.