Course 7 Pre-test Essay Questions

To folks that have previously taken the Course 7 pre-test:

I only have the sample exam issued by the SOA. Are there any sources of past pre-test exam questions. I am particulary interested in what past takers recall about the sorts of ESSAY questions that have been asked before.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Digby]

The questions for the course 7 pretest come from a "question bank" -- that is, there's a finite number of questions written so far, and they take a random number of them and slop a test together. So it is very possible that a question asked before will come up again. And again.

For this reason, describing previous Course 7 pretest questions is very forbidden.

Give it up...nobody can forbid you from talking about old tests!!! Is ths SS going to knock on your door?

I would like to see what types of questions have been asked too...

The SOA can kiss my #&$ with this forbidden crap!

[Phil]

The main thing about the essays is: Don't run out of time before you finish them. If you spend 10 minutes per essay you will be fine. I think they mainly want to see that you have written a lot.

As for the types of questions, two essays out of the four on my test were word-for-word questions; that is, you knew exactly what page in the study notes to turn to to answer the question, and the question could be answered entirely from just that one page.

One point to keep in mind about this type of essay: it is tempting to copy pages and pages of the textbook verbatim into your essay, but this takes *way too long*! You somehow have to summarize each paragraph as you go, or else you'll end up spending an hour on one essay.

The other two essays were more open-ended and could be answered with general knowledge or perhaps by looking up information in several small places in the text. Don't stress over it if you can't think of a great answer. This is the pre-test. I think they really just want to know if you've done the reading.

Good luck,
-Phil

[yeppers-wsmn]

This may have already been answered, but what has the split been (essay/mc) in the past pretests. Also, how many essays have there been (3, 4, more)?

[albert]

(Starting with the August 2002 pre-test, I believe that there will not be any written answer questions.)

The past breakdown (at least from what I know from October 2001 to the present) has been 80 points MC and 40 points WA. My experience on the written answer section was that most of the written answer questions simply involved finding the correct study note and essentially re-writing it but shortening it so that it did not take too long. One or two of the questions involved a little thinking.

What has helped some is to "jot short notes in the margins" - especially if such short notes were basically a table of contents with key words telling you where to turn (number the odd number pages - more "jotting").

While I didn't think that the pre-test involved as much work as Course 5 or 6 in proportion to the length of the exam (certainly it did not feel 40% (2/5) as difficult) - the MC section did require a few read throughs and taking of some notes.

When I took the pre-test I believe there were 6 essay questions worth a total of 40 points.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: albert on 2002-01-30 20:00 ]</font>