June 2018 Exam C Thread

[Art_Vandelay]

Mastering SOA307 and exposure to Mahler exams are the keys to success. Don’t short-change yourself, start working through the 307 as soon as you have completed a topic. If you need a mapping of question # to topic, pm me.

[Jim Daniel]

Condolences to those who failed C/4 this February sitting. I strongly recommend that you take it again in June, since STAM has a lot of new material (I judge it to have 20% more material than C/4) that you'd rather not have to learn.

In case you're interested, I have a C/4 face-to-face exam-prep seminar---my last before starting to offer STAM seminars in August---scheduled for 2 - 6 May. See my website http://www.actuarialseminars.com for lots of information.

[Tetsuo]

Originally Posted by Art_Vandelay

Mastering SOA307 and exposure to Mahler exams are the keys to success. Don’t short-change yourself, start working through the 307 as soon as you have completed a topic. If you need a mapping of question # to topic, pm me.

i mastered the 307 but failed today.

anyone got any advice for me?

[Adapt and Chill]

Originally Posted by Tetsuo

i mastered the 307 but failed today.

anyone got any advice for me?

The second part of George's advice:

Originally Posted by Art_Vandelay

and exposure to Mahler exams are the keys to success.

[suryD]

Same I felt pretty strong on the SOA questions but I felt like there were a lot of odd twist to the questions that ice never really seen before. Even the wording for some seemed a bit strange.

[Tetsuo]

Originally Posted by Adapt and Chill

The second part of George's advice:

i'll look at mahler, but just skimming through the one online i don't see anything like the questions i saw today on the exam

[Tetsuo]

Originally Posted by suryD

Same I felt pretty strong on the SOA questions but I felt like there were a lot of odd twist to the questions that ice never really seen before. Even the wording for some seemed a bit strange.

yeah i feel like you really had to know your sh*t to pass the exam i got today, and the SOA 307 was not enough. some of the questions weren't hard, but asked in very strange ways. i didn't get a single standard chi square Q where you look up the value on the table, but i did get a question on chi-square asked in a very strange way. that question was actually one of the easier ones, but it was just a weird problem, like what was the point of this?

[Adapt and Chill]

Originally Posted by Tetsuo

i'll look at mahler, but just skimming through the one online i don't see anything like the questions i saw today on the exam

Try taking it during your next study session and see how you do. I thought that Mahler exams were overrated at first, but after getting crushed by a couple of the later ones (#16 in particular), I eventually felt that Mahler's exams did a really effective job of enabling me to work through questions I had never seen before and tied concepts together like the actual exam. There's definitely some creativity required for some of his problems. There was only one question on the real exam that I felt truly unprepared for---I believe that it was mentioned in the textbook but not covered in ASM. However, I did see one very similar to it on a Mahler exam, although I decided that it was too obscure to be worth studying.

There are so many different ways that the material can be tested, it's best to be prepared for nearly anything and have strong fundamentals. Adapt is really repetitive and increased difficulty usually just means increased complexity for computations. The SOA 307 is somewhat close to the real thing, but only the difficult questions. The freebies included in there are somewhat misleading, and probably tend to inflate people's confidence.

[dkamka]

Exam was exactly what I expected after having done problems from the SOA 307 and previously released CAS/SOA exams. Difficulty conceptually was not complex on 99.99% of the problems just like the SOA 307. Computationally, the exam was of the typical SOA problems. Questions were simple, clear and easy to understand questions, if and only if I read them completely, slowly and carefully.

I used the following:
1) 10 short Mahler, plus 1st full length Mahler
2) 100% of TIA including lessons and 100% of 831 exercises(2x)
3) 100% of ASM problems
4) ADAPT on EL 6 for 1 week (passed all). ADAPT on EL 7 for 1 week (passed all). In addition, did 2 level 9 and 1 level 3, 4, & 5 ADAPT.
**Note that ADAPT automatically intersperses SOA 307/Past SOA/CAS exams**


I have one ASM 18th ed. 2nd printing for sale https://d.pr/free/i/N5CK92

$105 spiral bound

[Jerry Lundegaard]

I'm in on this thread. I just failed the February sitting. Had I not needed to pass the February sitting to get my ASA within the deadline, I would have waited until this sitting anyway. I had just under three months to prepare from scratch. I learned the material through the CA videos and then had just over two weeks to do ADAPT PEs. I managed to get seven done and didn't increase my EL at all. However, I felt surprisingly prepared, and had just about everything memorized that I needed to have memorized. I just didn't have enough practice. I'm feeling good about the June sitting. This time I plan on using SOA 307, Mahler PEs, and ADAPT to prepare.