No. 61: Pass

Hey everyone,

I’ve got some good news – I passed exam C/4! In retrospect, it felt like one of the most difficult exams I’ve ever taken, if not the hardest. I sacrificed three weeks of training and pretty much studied nonstop until I walked into the testing center for my sitting. The exam was a computerized test – the questions were drawn randomly with the passing score calibrated based on the difficulty of the questions. That means a test with easy questions will on average have a higher passmark than a test with hard questions. I must have gotten unlucky this time around because almost all of my questions were hard…there weren’t many questions I knew how to do right away, and I had to skip several when time ran out. I just felt relieved when I found out I had passed after submitting my answers.

I won’t get my score until mid-July, but my preliminary passing result has a 99.9975% chance of matching my final result. The one (or two) exams in the history of computerized actuarial exams whose preliminary results didn’t match the final results were due to human error in handling the scores. So, I’m confident that I passed…maybe barely. In my opinion didn’t study very well – I didn’t follow through with my plan to memorize every single definition and theorem from Loss Models. I did however, put in the recommended 300-400 hours, which is probably more than what most people did, but I think at my level, the efficiency of study was somewhat lacking. I ought to have improved over last time, but I didn’t get rid of the bad habit of holding off until the last two months to study…I kind of got away with it since I’m really familiar with the way standardized tests work. The raw probability of any one individual passing 4 exams in a row is only 2.6%…I ought to consider myself lucky for having a smooth path so far, but I aim to make my next pass based off hard work.

There might have been a slight improvement over the last sitting as I was seriously looking at the material at least two months ahead of time, compared to 6 weeks before the exam date last time and 4 weeks the time before that. Those are merely rough guesses, though, so for my next test, MFE/3F, which I’ll be taking in November, I’ve made it a point to start early (I started studying the day after I passed), to record each day what I’ve studied, and to use linear interpolation to predict when I’ll finish the material. I suppose in this sense I shouldn’t expect a miraculous improvement in studying…if I can just do one thing better than I did last time (like memorizing all of the definitions) for each of the next 6 exams, the cumulative effect of these small improvements should pay off over time.

I’m working on some interesting things – I’m currently designing some simulations on the dowry problem that I’ll write about next week. But for now I’m pretty tired. I finally got around to reading The Cyclist’s Training Bible and I’m almost a third of the way through it. There are a lot of things I learned from that book, and I’m looking forward to building a new training program in the coming months. It looks like I’m too out of shape to participate in the summer races, and I think I might have sacrificed too much of my fitness to target the late-season races…then again, I wouldn’t be able to race at all if I didn’t make the income to support it, so in the end I think it was worth it.

By the way, it looks like I finally broke my New Year’s resolution. I managed to update this blog 18 weeks in a row but I stopped because of the exam. Now I’m back.