No. 43: A Perfect Score, Imperfect Preparation

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to make this quick because I need to wake up early tomorrow. I just wanted to let you know that I received a perfect score of 10 on Exam MLC/3L, which I received today to my relief. This is my second perfect score – I got also got a 10 on FM/2 last year. I felt confident that I would pass but today confirmed how well I thought I did after I took the test. A score of 10 doesn’t mean that I answered every single question correctly, which I probably didn’t since I had to guess on a handful of them when I ran out of time towards the end of the test. Rather, the SOA determines an initial pass mark (usually around 18 or 19 of the 30 questions), equates that to a 6, and increments the score equating each previous or subsequent point to 10% of the pass mark. For instance, if they set the pass mark at 19, a score of 6 means you got 19 right on the exam. A score of 7 means you got 21 or 22 right (since 19 + 1.9 = 20.9), a score of 8 means you got 23 or 24 right, and so on.

A score of 10 means I finished somewhere on the right side of the distribution – but since the SOA doesn’t release the distribution of scores I can’t determine my percentile or performance relative to my peers, though they do release the pass rate which usually ends up somewhere between 40%-55% of the candidates. Although I do feel satisfied with the result, I don’t feel happy with the way I studied or prepared for the exam. I skipped the May sitting because I moved to Memorial for my new job, and I had to take care of a lot of “firsts” in life such as apartment rent, savings and retirement accounts, bills, and so on and so forth, which may or may not belong to the set of acceptable excuses for skipping an important professional exam. Furthermore, the SOA introduced significant changes to the MLC syllabus effective in 2012, so skipping the first sitting in 2011 meant that I only had one shot to pass before the exam change. Also, I only started studying in mid-August which gave me about 2.75 months to study (which may seem ideal for others, but short for me). I studied frantically, and I don’t think I paced myself well at all.

Anyway, I can at least put away the anxiety of the hardest preliminary exam, but I’ve made it my goal to not make the same mistakes as I have in the past. The next exam, C/4, from what I hear has easier problems than those in MLC, but the calculations require more steps, which leaves more space for human error so I have to tread carefully. The exam feels more like an older sibling to the first exam, P/1 since you work with probability distributions, but work with more sophisticated modeling techniques and more complicated distributions. I decided to change my method of study to include a lot more rote memory since the exam focuses more on knowledge of methods, rather than insight and creativity (the C/4 questions are more similar to “do this method on this data set” as opposed to the “what can you conclude from this” style questions found on MLC). I’ve already created a Temporary Memory Bank in written form (you can find the file on my sky drive as “temp_mem_bank”), which includes concepts that I’ve committed to memory for this test, but have not, as of now committed to permanent memory as I have in the Permanent Memory Bank.

I’ve set the word count limit for my posts as 500 for the minimum and 1000 for the maximum. I figured, that updating the blog with extremely short posts would not satisfy the requirements of a New Year’s resolution, so I decided that 500 words seemed appropriate since I had to write brief, 500-word essays every week during my English course of my first semester of college (in addition to 3 longer papers ~5 pages and a term paper ~20 pages). This post, at ~750 words, took me less than an hour. I put a limit of 1000 words since these are blog posts, not dissertations, and I feel no need to bore the time-conscious reader.

As a side note – I ordered some new tubulars for the 2012 race season. One of these is mine:

My new set of wheels is in there, somewhere. Photo by Philip Shama