Which Study manual did you use and how well did you do?

[Jemaine Clement]

Poll will be posted in a moment.

[Locrian]

I used ASM as my study manual, but I'm not sure I would have passed without Batten's seminar. He's amazing.

I'll also say that, while I was mildly irritated with ASM for MFE, I HATED it for MLC. Hated it. I really have nothing good to say about ASM anymore, except this: I've used it every exam so far, and passed every one on the first time.

And so, I will grudgingly use it again for C.

[youngorchard]

looks like ASM's the winner.. but I have to agree with Locrian that the ASM manual for MLC was quite tedious. I don't understand why they had to break the chapters down into so many smaller pieces. It would have been better to integrate similar topics and combine the practice questions to actually make us get ready for real-exam situations where we don't exactly know what specific topics the questions are related to.

[dzdydx]

Originally Posted by youngorchard

looks like ASM's the winner.. but I have to agree with Locrian that the ASM manual for MLC was quite tedious. I don't understand why they had to break the chapters down into so many smaller pieces. It would have been better to integrate similar topics and combine the practice questions to actually make us get ready for real-exam situations where we don't exactly know what specific topics the questions are related to.

I liked the small bite-sized lessons of ASM. They enabled me to spend an hour or two every night to do 1 or 2 lessons along with some practice questions. The fact that most of the lessons take only an hour to complete made gauging my progress a lot easier. The end-of-lesson exercises were not trivially confined to their own lessons once you work past the first 4 or 5.

With the ASM manual for MFE, many of the lessons were monstrous beasts (examples include exotic options, brownian motion, ito's lemma) that would take upwards of 2 hours just to do a thorough read-through, not including the time spent doing end-of-lesson exerciess.

[Hawgdriver]

I used Guo (ARCH) and the SOA 282. And I used the ASM PE#1 (free samples!) and Spring 07 MLC.

[actuarygal]

I used Actex for my manual but I'll also reiterate the value of Batten's seminar. He is phenomenal and I would not have had a chance at passing on the first attempt without him...

[gracyjoe]

I used ASM and loved the fact that the exams are harder than the real exam. (Not really the case for MFE though IMO) There were times when I wished the end of lesson exercises had a few more easy ones just to make sure you got the basics down before throwing in tricks.

My biggest concern with ASM is the number of errors. However, Abe is great at responding to any questions and or comments on these. (Pointing out and looking for errors made me make sure I understood it though)

I think the number of lessons worked well for this. If you wanted to only do half the end of lesson exercises you could. Also the sizes were good for just sitting down and finishing a lesson in one sitting.

For C I plan on only doing half the end of lesson exercises and working back every so often to keep the old stuff fresh. Most likely going with ASM.

[scotth]

I've had lots of good things and a few not so good things about both James Washer's The Infinite Actuary online seminar and Abe Weishaus' ASM manual.

In defense of Abe's manual errors: This guy has 4 different study manuals. (or maybe 3.5 since much of 3L and MLC is shared) He has almost never not responded to an email from me (and probably hundreds of other questions) in less than 24 hours, he is a frequent poster on these boards answering student questions, and I'm sure he has a life too.

I'm sure he could pay 5-10+ actuaries to go page-by-page and edit each new edition of his manual.. but then we probably would have to pay far more than $100. So to keep costs low, we are the editors. hundreds if not thousands of students use his manual every sitting and some find small errors, others large one. I've personally probably found 20 or so in the MLC/MFE manuals.

Not everything gets caught, and it gets better with every new edition. He keeps a ~daily updated errata, but until we have access to a live online PDF or something of his manual, it's the nature of the print study manual beast.

TIA has had errors, some minor, some are more major that require the video being re-recorded. This is the advantage the online on-demand format has, it can update errors almost seamlessly, and you are always getting the most up to date version.


As far as the best method, i'll leave that for others to debate. Some learn best by reading, some learn best by listening to someone perform steps. If you are clearly in one of those two categories, you should stick primarily with that method. I personally would recommend both... a live or online seminar combined with a study manual.

The one thing thats great about MLC is that there are 42 years of released exams for all actuarial teachers to use. So many products will have 90% of the same problems as the other product. I can't tell you how many times I was doing a problem in a TIA practice set, and the solution didn't make complete sense to me, so I found the specific problem in the ASM manual which sometimes cleared it up.

You can read more about TIA in this thread from last string where people talked about their experiences.
http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actu....php?p=3660194
and a post I made comparing the two a little more in depth. (also last sitting)
http://www.actuarialoutpost.com/actu...4&postcount=55

ASM
Pros: Typeset and style quality, excellent email response time, reference, permanent. many problems written by Abe himself, 8 practice exams.

Cons: Errata page which you need to check every few days, it's BIG and you can't exactly take it everywhere (though it's not bound so you can take sets of pages with you), if I get a page messy by dropping food on it or tearing it, its also permanent...

TIA
Pros: Not as many video solutions as you would like, especially in the later lessons. Not as many problems written by James himself that I would have liked. James has good response time but not as consistently good as Abe, sometimes he even answers from his iPhone.

Cons: Tied to only using it online, or now with downloadable mp3s. 2 practice exams. Time-limited... once you pass or fail twice, you no longer have access. This probably isn't a big issue with MLC, but there are a number of people in the MFE forum who are on their 3rd or 4th attempt...but i'm not going to discuss the MFE seminar here. Expensive, even with a student discount...the MLC seminar is their most expensive prelim.

[thrillhouse]

I also liked how the topics were broken up into pieces in ASM. Got to walk before you can crawl. I used ASM for MFE & C. Many thanks go to Abe for helping me pass these three exams (assuming my PAK score holds up on MLC).

Also, the TeX has to be ridiculously tedious for MLC with all the decorations on the symbols. Frankly, I'm kind of surprised it turns out as clean as it does, although some of that is probably to do with this being the eighth edition.

[tomorrow never knows]

Thrillhouse - what a great name. Quite possibly the best name on AO.