2011 Appeals?

[actuwhat]

Has anyone heard whether appeals for exam 8 have been completed? Looking at the exam 6 forum, some people (both 6C and 6U) received calls late last week that their grades were being changed from a fail to a pass based on an appeal(s).

[UltiActuary]

Got my appeal letter today, in summary none of them were accepted. Same bland response on each:

"The alternative answer that you suggested was evaluated during the grading process but was no accepted. Upon review, it was determined that the original judgement applied during the grading process was appropriate and your appeal has been denied"

Basically what I expect nowadays from the CAS, stick firm to original decisions despite how poor they may be. Some of these were straight forward, like on #1 they took off a substantial amount of credit if you only applied the test statistic to the 3 year case. When applied it clearly showed which state had more variability and the question was very open ended asking "Which state has more variability" and leaving it open to the candidate. The question never said to apply the test statistic multiple times and it was pretty clear cut that one had more than the other.

Very dumb that even though you show how to apply the method perfectly that they would still denied a student a large portion of credit.

[burly189]

Originally Posted by actuwhat

Has anyone heard whether appeals for exam 8 have been completed? Looking at the exam 6 forum, some people (both 6C and 6U) received calls late last week that their grades were being changed from a fail to a pass based on an appeal(s).

Looks like they have been completed:
http://www.casact.org/cms/index.cfm?...articleID=2009

[UltiActuary]

Originally Posted by burly189

Looks like they have been completed:
http://www.casact.org/cms/index.cfm?...articleID=2009

The 23% pass ratio is now a 24% pass ratio, problem solved. Great work CAS.

[Cymru]

Originally Posted by UltiActuary

The 23% pass ratio is now a 24% pass ratio, problem solved. Great work CAS.

While the additional transparency is great, the appeals process was a distraction from the key issues of how the pass mark is set and grading to the nearest 1/4 of a point when you cut the number of points available by nearly 1/2.

[jwhitaker]

Originally Posted by Cymru

While the additional transparency is great, the appeals process was a distraction from the key issues of how the pass mark is set and grading to the nearest 1/4 of a point when you cut the number of points available by nearly 1/2.

Speaking of distractions...

While actuaries debate how to best conduct their antiquated examination process that takes a minimum of 4000 hours to complete (thats 2 years of full time employment) and has almost nothing to do with their actual tasks, statisticians are completely taking over the ratemaking function, the goverment is taking over large swaths of the insurance market (completely eliminating the need for pricing or reserving, whats left will be done by economists) and climate scientists and engineers are making the best actuarial models for pricing property risks utterly irrelevant. The government would also like to completely prescribe your ERM and capital requirements, too.

So yeah, we are being distracted from some key issues, big time.

[patuary]

Originally Posted by jwhitaker

Speaking of distractions...

While actuaries debate how to best conduct their antiquated examination process that takes a minimum of 4000 hours to complete (thats 2 years of full time employment) and has almost nothing to do with their actual tasks, statisticians are completely taking over the ratemaking function, the goverment is taking over large swaths of the insurance market (completely eliminating the need for pricing or reserving, whats left will be done by economists) and climate scientists and engineers are making the best actuarial models for pricing property risks utterly irrelevant. The government would also like to completely prescribe your ERM and capital requirements, too.

So yeah, we are being distracted from some key issues, big time.

I thought about this post for a long time. What do you think the CAS should do about it?
-Allow statisticians, scientists, etc. to join the CAS with little/no additional testing (or maybe some more relevant testing), à la the experienced CERA pathway?
-Revamp the education process to include specialist tracks that have more focused material?
-Replace some exams with modeling projects?
-Other ideas?

I would be in favor of all of the above.

[ebradford]

Originally Posted by patuary

I thought about this post for a long time. What do you think the CAS should do about it?
-Allow statisticians, scientists, etc. to join the CAS with little/no additional testing (or maybe some more relevant testing), à la the experienced CERA pathway?
-Revamp the education process to include specialist tracks that have more focused material?
-Replace some exams with modeling projects?
-Other ideas?

I would be in favor of all of the above.

What should we do about it? We need a clear strategic vision of what it means to be a CAS Actuary. Just like any successful product or idea we need to occupy a unique space in the marketplace of professional services.

What do we do better than anyone else?

I'll offer up my staw man answer. I'd say what we do better than anyone else is quantify and price risk. I don't think we should try to compete directly with statisticians, we've never claimed to be better at stats than a statistician and we don't need to be. We also don't need to be underwriters and we shouldn't pretend that we can qualitatively assess risk in the same way that they can. Instead a CAS actuary is a businessman who you can call up and can answer the question "Should take on this book of business and at what price?" In other words drawing on our industry knowledge and quantitative skills we can assess and price based on the client or underwriter's qualitative assessment and also help get the project off the ground.

I worked briefly with a statistician who had much more statistical knowledge than I did but had absolutely no idea what exposure was. He had no idea what the data was that he was working with or how to analyze something that didn't fit into a model.

So I guess I think a P&C actuary should be part statistician, part data programmer, part economist/forecaster, part risk manager, and part underwriter. Also he should be an indisputable expert in whatever line of business he's chosen to focus on. If you do this then a statistician can be viewed as a valuable team member and not a threat.

[Kongo]

Originally Posted by ebradford

What should we do about it? We need a clear strategic vision of what it means to be a CAS Actuary. Just like any successful product or idea we need to occupy a unique space in the marketplace of professional services.

What do we do better than anyone else?

I'll offer up my staw man answer. I'd say what we do better than anyone else is quantify and price risk. I don't think we should try to compete directly with statisticians, we've never claimed to be better at stats than a statistician and we don't need to be. We also don't need to be underwriters and we shouldn't pretend that we can qualitatively asses risk in the same way that they can. Instead a CAS actuary is a businessman who you can call up and can answer the question "Should take on this book of business and at what price?" In other words drawing on our industry knowledge and quantitative skills we can assess and price based on the client or underwriter's qualitative assessment and also help get the project off the ground.I worked briefly with a statistician who had much more statistical knowledge than I did but had absolutely no idea what exposure was. He had no idea what the data was that he was working with or how to analyze something that didn't fit into a model.

So I guess I think a P&C actuary should be part statistician, part data programmer, part economist/forecaster, part risk manager, and part underwriter. Also he should be an indisputable expert in whatever line of business he's chosen to focus on. If you do this then a statistician can be viewed as a valuable team member and not a threat.

Sadly, that decision is made by the Chief Underwriting Officer

[ebradford]

Originally Posted by Kongo

Sadly, that decision is made by the Chief Underwriting Officer

Well usually the actuary doesn't make the final decision but he can give an analysis and price recommendation. Underwriters are good at understanding the business relationships and have a good idea about whether a risk or book is 'good' or 'bad' relative to a typical risk but they largely don't have a good way to quantify it. Also the underwriter might not pick up things like 'these claims are being reported much later than I'd expect' or 'where are the small med only claims? are they paying claims under the table?'

Anyway a bad actuary could be replaced by a smart excel sheet, outsourced overseas, a good statistician or underwriter. A good actuary couldn't be replaced by any of these things. The same idea could be said for any profession really.