College Course Credit is a joke

[mcole6]

I just thought I would come on here and vent for a minute. I just passed FM so I am in the process of trying to satisfy my VEE credits. I graduated college about two years ago and didn't really know what an actuary was until the end of my senior year when I was trying to find a job. Anyways to make a long story short I have a Math degree and an Economics Minor. I went to Eatern Michigan University where according to the SOA you needed to have taken Intermediate Macro Analysis and Intermediate Micro Analysis in order to obtain the VEE economics credit. I took both of these courses, but received a C+ in the Intermediate Macro course. This was one of only two classes that I scored a C+ or lower during college and now it has come back to haunt me.

The criteria is not equal depending on which university you look at. For instance if I had attended "Lansing Community College" I would have only had to take intro level economics to satisy these courses.

I took intro level courses at Eastern and passed both with A's so how can the SOA justify that an intro level econ course from a 2 year community college (Lansing) is equivalent to a intermediate level course from a four year college (Eastern Michigan University)?

Does anyone have contact information so I can talk to someone about this. I think they need to re-structure this and make it equal.

thanks for listening:swear:

[tommie frazier]

they base it on course description. that's it.

no no ever said the VEE was fair, the same for everyone, or whatever. I agree with your thoughts as to why it makes for a lousy measuring stick.

look into the CLEP exams. people rave about them as easy.

mods-please move thread to somewhere in VEE land.

[no driver]

Read up on the CLEP exams. If you already know economics you should be able to get them out of the way in short order.

[vjvj]

I very much agree that taking the CLEP exam is your easiest alternative going forward.

Except... you might want to take a look to see if you could get the EMU intro macro courses added to the SOA's list. The reason the intermediate courses are on the SOA's list is because somebody took the effort to get those particular courses added to the list - not necessarily because they were deemed the only courses that fit the requirements. There is a possibility that the intro courses could be added as well. There are several schools that have multiple sets of economics classes approved.

[mcole6]

I very much agree that taking the CLEP exam is your easiest alternative going forward.

Except... you might want to take a look to see if you could get the EMU intro macro courses added to the SOA's list. The reason the intermediate courses are on the SOA's list is because somebody took the effort to get those particular courses added to the list - not necessarily because they were deemed the only courses that fit the requirements. There is a possibility that the intro courses could be added as well. There are several schools that have multiple sets of economics classes approved.

Does anyone know who to contact regarding this idea?

Thanks vjvj

[tommie frazier]

http://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-vee.aspx

email at bottom of page

[vjvj]

There are some links at the bottom of here:

http://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-vee.aspx

The guidelines for macro don't seem all that restrictive. I'd think you might have a good chance.

You'll need to get some help from the Econ dept at EMU for the process, as the form requires a contact there. Plus you'll need to provide proof that the class meets the SOA requirements - course description and syllabus.

[nonactuarialactuary]

Penn State's entry level economics courses (ECON 002 and ECON 004) count for VEE credit, so I don't think the VEE's for this particular topic are too hard to satisfy if you go through the process. For the regression and time series VEEs, we needed to get special approval by the SOA for some of the courses. Basically, the classes were taught at the graduate level, so STAT 501 and STAT 510 counted for VEE credit. There was a pretty sizable actuarial major at Penn State, so a lot of undergrads wanted to take these courses, but Penn State limits undergrads from taking grad-level courses without prior approval. Rather than go through the hassle of manually approving all that wanted to take the graduate courses, Penn State opened up two undergrad courses (STAT 462 and STAT 463) that covered the same material (even using the same textbooks) as the graduate classes. I'm assuming that someone within the statistics department at Penn State needed to contact the SOA/CAS and provide course descriptions and syllabi before the courses were officially added to the list. The point of this message is that it's entirely possible to get these added to the list as long as you have someone in the econ department backing you up. I believe they retroactively accept courses too back to a certain date, so make sure to have the SOA review the syllabus from when you took the course or an earlier timeframe. Good luck!

[ShakeNBakes]

I remember having to do this for my VEEs. You don't need a professor to submit a course, you just have to go to the records office and do some digging. I needed to send them a course description and syllabus in its current form, same docs for as far back as I wanted the course approved, and maybe a couple other items. It was a couple years ago now, so I can't remember exactly. I submitted all the stuff they wanted and got a letter about 7-8 weeks later saying the courses I submitted were approved.

I recall having some back and forth with somebody at vee@soa.org so they should know the score.

[mcole6]

Thanks for the info guys. I sent an email and I guess we will see where it goes.