Errata

[Howard Mahler]

The CAS posted errata for some of the Part 5 readings.

I just sent in some additional (suspected) errata on some of the Part 5 Readings (other than Krakowski) to the CAS office.

It would be helpful if anyone has any suspected errata on any of the readings on a CAS exam, they send them to the CAS office.
Thomas Downey <tdowney@casact.org>

Please give a careful reference (Exam #, reading, page, etc.) and clearly state what you think is wrong.

If the Syllabus Committee agrees it is an error, they will post it on the CAS webpage. (I am not on the Syllabus Committee, Exam Committee, etc.)

Howard Mahler

P.S. Please limit yourself to actual errors, rather than commenting on poor wording, opinions with which you do not agree, out of date information that was true at the time the paper was written, general complaints about the exams or syllabus, etc. Tom is just a hardworking employee at the CAS Office.

[Howard Mahler]

F.Y.I. here is what I sent to the CAS.
While I believe these are errors, they have not been checked by the Syllabus Committee or the authors.

McClenahan:

Page 95, Figure 3.2 should be On-Level Premium,

Page 108, table at the bottom, third line, U/(1 + T) not U/(1 - T).

Page 109, Figure 3.8, there is no label on the y-axis and all of the values are zero on the y-axis.

Page 129, General Expenses should be $45,000 (in order to match the solution.)

The references in Exhibits 3.9 to 3.14 to other exhibit numbers are wrong.

Page 146, Exhibit 3.14, territory and class are reversed in the whole exhibit.

Page 147, [3] .5 should be a power as should 1.5 in [4].

Finger:

Page 313, statement in the last sentence is not correct. The claim count distribution would be negative binomial if the author's variable Chi is Gamma Distributed, however the author does not state that assumption.

Marker & Mohl:

Page 277: Figure 8 at the bottom, the $400 should be $450. ($210 + $260 + $290 + $320 + $450 = $1530.)

Page 284: Near the top of the page, the third region has area 4/9 not 2/9. (4/9 + 1/9 + 4/9 = 1.)

[Plant Food]

The one problem I have with publishing errata is that the errata changes the reading. For example, the Part 6 paper by McKnight was updated to include detailed instructions on computing column 10 in Exhibit 1, Page 1. The original reading did not and I made the assumption that column 10 was input data. I was unaware of the changes and, as a result, couldn't answer the question on the exam. All I could do was put down the formula and hope for partial credit.

The same thing will probably happen to someone with the Krakowski paper.

Someone needs to explain to the Syllabus Committee that errata means "an error in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with its correction on a separate sheet" (M-W dictionary) not a rewrite of portions of a paper.

In Exhibit 3.5, McClenahan determines a linear trend for severity (it looks like a good fit) but then uses the last 2 years of the linear approximation to compute an exponential trend to use in Exhibit 3.8. Is that something that should go on the errata?

[Colymbosathon ecplecticos]

If the errata were included in the readings you could get a question like the following:

(T/F) According the errata, the 1.478 on page 93 should be 1.558.

[Howard Mahler]

In the case of the Krakowski paper, it is very likely that the exam committee would not have had the errata when they prepared questions for this Spring.

Perhaps for the next year, the Syllabus Committee could do something about the Krakowski paper. Ideally we would have a new pdf file including all the corrections. Feel free to suggest this to them.

Your McClenahan example is not an error. It is not what I would have done in this situation, but it is what he intended.

Howard Mahler

P.S. When papers are added to the syllabus from the CAS Forum, there is a higher probability of errors, since Forum papers are not subject to review. Ideally, the Syllabus Committee would go through them carefully to catch any errors, but I do not think they always do this.

P.P.S. Anyone who has written anything actuarial knows how easy it is for errors to sneak in, unless several people very carefully go through what you have done.

[idomoneus]

There may be an erratum in Lange (p. 165). At the bottom of the page he writes in parenthesis, "e.g. 15/30, 20/20, 25/50, etc."

I think that the "20/20" should be "20/40", which would correspond to the column headings on the table on the following page. "20/20" seems confusing since it is not clear that it has a greater limit than "15/30" (the per accident limit is lower).

Is this a genuine error or is there something that I am not seeing?

[Colymbosathon ecplecticos]

I'm sure that it should read "20/40".