Anderson Darling

[Tim><]

Please indicate any basic concepts that may get you through a word question, if you chose option #2.

[Summer]

just memorizing that formula.

[AG]

Skip it. Any other polls on things to skip? Skip them too. Bayes? Why bother. Regression? Bah! Humbugs! Skip it, skip it, skip this, skip that. Just study what you already know. That makes the studying go oh, so much faster.

Starring, in order of appearance:
and

[benjamce]

It's a painful formula but I think it's doable. And seeing how they removed some information I think this and Kernel Smoothing are going to be on the exam.

Just one more formula to memorize.

[Engedi]

The theory is hard to learn,and there are NO qestions on past 6 released exams.

If I can't memorize and use the messy formula well on exam day, all of my time and efforts is wasted.

It's a dangerous investment !

[VernSchil]

Alledgedly an AD question appeared on the unreleased May 03 exam. Still doesn't mean I'd study it, but it shows that the committee is not afraid to test us on it.

[tmt513]

Usually, I try to avoid memorizing formulas whenever possible and try to solve problems through my understanding of the theory. In the case of Anderson-Darling, I just memorized the summation formula and practiced using it a few times. If there's a way to understand it easily enough to be able to solve problems quickly without having to memorize any formula, I didn't bother coming up with it because this material got boring really quickly.

[Clam Chowdah]

Let's test how opinion has changed in 5 years now that we've recently seen a computational anderson-darling question.
As of today the breakdown is as such.

Skipping it completely 20 50.00%
Learning the basic concept behind the test 9 22.50%
Memorizing the formula 11 27.50%
Other 0 0%
Voters: 40.

Here is some excellent advice on dealing with this pesky subject.
http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actu...4&postcount=16

[TwoStep]

It was on the Fall 2008 exam, but they gave you the formula.

[Mil]

they did give us the formula, but no matter how many times I have attempted to solve that problem, I was not able to.