SOA CPD Exposure Draft

[campbell]

Grading exams had best count for an organized activity.

[bdschobel]

Originally Posted by JMO Fan

Value of FSA will not rise due to CPD. Many FSAs will lower their opinion of SoA. MAAA is adequate for the need.

Wow, I hardly know where to begin:

1. What does MAAA have to do with anything? The qualification standard approved by the AAA Board on May 23, 2007, applies to all U.S. practitioners, regardless of membership in the AAA (a result of the uniform Code of Professional Conduct).

2. Roughly three-fourths of SOA members are members of the AAA. Many others are Canadian (and the CIA has its own CPD requirement) or practice outside the U.S. or Canada, in which case no requirement may apply currently.

3. The public and other users of actuarial services have a right to know which actuaries have made an effort to maintain their knowledge and which have not. This is a transparency issue. I believe that the value of an "active" FSA will rise, but that's not the point.

4. If "many" (let's say "some") actuaries have a lower opinion of the SOA for attempting to distinguish between "active" and "inactive" actuaries, then so be it. Transparency is almost always good, but it isn't free.

Bruce

[FattyMcGee]

Originally Posted by campbell

Grading exams had best count for an organized activity.

Section C.7.e

The problem I have is that the non-structured items are an hours-based requirement, not a content-based requirement. That is, in C.7.j and C.8.a are examples of activities that would meet the self-study credit requirements. However, both of these items, and many more items that would meet the CE requirements, are variable as to the time it would take to complete.

Originally Posted by CPD REQUIREMENT exposure draft, C.8.a

example: Tracy Member was recently promoted to lead a team of actuarial students. She reads a book on managing and motivating team members, which takes eight hours. She can count that as 9.6 units of self-study business and management CPD credit.

Fine, Tracy got credit for her self-study. Now, when Bill Memberinactive read the same book, because he's a fast reader he only needed 6 hours to complete it. Stacy Partnerincrime, though, is a bit slower, and her reading is done on the train, where there are more distractions, so it takes her 10 hours to read. From the conversion, Bill gets 7.2 units and Stacy gets 12. Why does Bill have to then complete additional units of credit in order to prove he's gotten the benefit out of the book that Tracy and Stacy did?

I don't know best how to solve the problem. For "structured activities" the requirement may be adequate. Since nobody will be getting inherently more benefit from their 50 minutes than another, the time requirement is OK. But it seems as if there will be an inversion of the results from the self-study requirement - those that are already good (at reading, at grading exams, etc.) will continue to get better, faster, because they will need to do more activities to maintain their status. At the other end, those who are behind (because they are slower readers, slower to write an article, etc.) will continue to fall behind more and more as they meet their requirements with fewer and fewer varied self-study activities.

Perhaps instead of an hours-based requirement the credit could be earned based on pages read / written, a minimum # of topics covered, or an increase in the credits earned that would allow members to recognize a certain # of units equivalent to the # of units that the slowest qualifying member received for the same self-study activity the prior year. There could be many more options. None seems ideal, but many, to me, seem better than simply a time-based requirement.

[FattyMcGee]

Would the time spent composing the prior post be considered qualifying activity for the self-study component? I mean, it's obviously not "normal work duties".

[JMO]

OK, let me ask it again. Why is the number of hours in "structured activities" greater in the SOA version than in the AAA version?

[_BullDog_]

Originally Posted by FattyMcGee

Section C.7.e

The problem I have is that the non-structured items are an hours-based requirement, not a content-based requirement. That is, in C.7.j and C.8.a are examples of activities that would meet the self-study credit requirements. However, both of these items, and many more items that would meet the CE requirements, are variable as to the time it would take to complete.


Fine, Tracy got credit for her self-study. Now, when Bill Memberinactive read the same book, because he's a fast reader he only needed 6 hours to complete it. Stacy Partnerincrime, though, is a bit slower, and her reading is done on the train, where there are more distractions, so it takes her 10 hours to read. From the conversion, Bill gets 7.2 units and Stacy gets 12. Why does Bill have to then complete additional units of credit in order to prove he's gotten the benefit out of the book that Tracy and Stacy did?

I don't know best how to solve the problem. For "structured activities" the requirement may be adequate. Since nobody will be getting inherently more benefit from their 50 minutes than another, the time requirement is OK. But it seems as if there will be an inversion of the results from the self-study requirement - those that are already good (at reading, at grading exams, etc.) will continue to get better, faster, because they will need to do more activities to maintain their status. At the other end, those who are behind (because they are slower readers, slower to write an article, etc.) will continue to fall behind more and more as they meet their requirements with fewer and fewer varied self-study activities.

Perhaps instead of an hours-based requirement the credit could be earned based on pages read / written, a minimum # of topics covered, or an increase in the credits earned that would allow members to recognize a certain # of units equivalent to the # of units that the slowest qualifying member received for the same self-study activity the prior year. There could be many more options. None seems ideal, but many, to me, seem better than simply a time-based requirement.

you just need to measure everything in effective hours read, kind of like how the SoA measures the number of pages on the exams and how one exam may have 2700 pages and another one has 2300 but the SoA thinks they both have 2000 pages (or what ever their effective pages were).

Originally Posted by MountainHawk

Random audits. SoA thinks actuaries aren't trustyworthy, I guess.

In my experience (and I have a CFP which requires CPD) random audits are pretty standard for most CPD programs.

[JMO]

Originally Posted by Will Durant

In my experience (and I have a CFP which requires CPD) random audits are pretty standard for most CPD programs.

True true.

And if the CPD is provided by the SOA, they have kindly offered to keep track of it for you - pretty easy to audit when the auditor is also the recordkeeper.

[bdschobel]

Originally Posted by FattyMcGee

The problem I have is that the non-structured items are an hours-based requirement, not a content-based requirement.... I don't know best how to solve the problem. For "structured activities" the requirement may be adequate. Since nobody will be getting inherently more benefit from their 50 minutes than another, the time requirement is OK. But it seems as if there will be an inversion of the results from the self-study requirement - those that are already good (at reading, at grading exams, etc.) will continue to get better, faster, because they will need to do more activities to maintain their status. At the other end, those who are behind (because they are slower readers, slower to write an article, etc.) will continue to fall behind more and more as they meet their requirements with fewer and fewer varied self-study activities.

Perhaps instead of an hours-based requirement the credit could be earned based on pages read / written, a minimum # of topics covered, or an increase in the credits earned that would allow members to recognize a certain # of units equivalent to the # of units that the slowest qualifying member received for the same self-study activity the prior year. There could be many more options. None seems ideal, but many, to me, seem better than simply a time-based requirement.

If I were commenting on the SOA's proposal, I might make these same observations. Everyone acknowledges that hour-based measurements of continuing education are imperfect (at least), notwithstanding their use by so many other professions. Perhaps one day the basic requirement could be supplemented by reading lists that prescribe a certain number of hours for reading specified papers and articles that, by implication, are recommended. We'll have to see how this evolves over time.

Bruce

[campbell]

Having read the description of "structured credit" in the SOA CPD, it seems to encompass a wide range of activities, beyond just going to SOA meetings.