Practice Exam Scores

[MelonPicklesMayo]

Originally Posted by som101

Did anyone do exam 8 from Mahler, I found it to be super hard

me too

[JMI]

Originally Posted by som101

Did anyone do exam 8 from Mahler, I found it to be super hard

Same. I thought it was the hardest of the 14.

[Staky41]

ASM 10th Edition
1: 12/35
2: 12/35
3: 16/35
4: 16/35
5: 21/35
7: 22/35

Getting better... I tried doing a Mahler practice exam - the wording is throwing me off. Does anyone know if the actual exam is closer to ASM or Mahler practice exams??

[Dedicated111]

Originally Posted by Staky41

ASM 10th Edition
1: 12/35
2: 12/35
3: 16/35
4: 16/35
5: 21/35
7: 22/35

Getting better... I tried doing a Mahler practice exam - the wording is throwing me off. Does anyone know if the actual exam is closer to ASM or Mahler practice exams??

As far as wording, I'm going to go more towards Mahler. He does a good job at giving you problems in a way that the exam committee may ask them.

[Bobby]

Originally Posted by Staky41

Getting better... I tried doing a Mahler practice exam - the wording is throwing me off. Does anyone know if the actual exam is closer to ASM or Mahler practice exams??

I took the exam in May using only ASM and the one thing that threw me off was the wording. ASM is very clear in how it wants you to do the problem, whereas the SOA is often vague. I've been using Mahler this time around and I find his original problems to be worded more closely to the real thing. Make sure to do the SOA 289 and the released exams before taking the test, so that you can get familiar with how they word problems on the test.

[JMI]

Originally Posted by Rake

I finished 7 last night. I'm thinking now that I'm just going to go back through them, rather than chug through the last three. Seven wasn't bad at all, but there were a couple questions that made me irate... #24 and #32 off the top of my head.

Do we really need to know what a Sibuya distribution is?

[Josia]

Sibuya isn't so bad if you look at it as a Zero Truncated Negative Binomial (in tables) as Beta goes to Infinity. The Beta / (1 + Beta) terms go to 1 and the (1+Beta)^r terms go to zero (r is negative). Everything simplifies pretty nicely after those adjustments. With that said, I've no idea if it has ever been tested.

For problem 24 on ASM PE7 and similar algebraic nightmares, use the table functionality on the TI-30XS. For that problem, solve for r using the Table button and the rest comes pretty quickly.

[Josia]

PE Scores thus far:

ASM version 11

01: 28 / 35
02: 26 / 35
03: 26 / 35 (this one was more challenging than the score shows - was lucky)
04: 28 / 35
05: 29 / 35
06: 28 / 35
07: 30 / 35 (overall easier exam, though had a few oddball questions)
08: 29 / 35 (tricky questions. 2 stupid last step calc mistakes :/ )
09: 30 / 35 (one of the more challenging exams yet, was lucky with several 'educated' guesses)
10: 25 / 35 (Ouch! On par with exam 3. Having trouble recollecting a straight forward problem.)

TIA:

01: 31 / 35 - Good bit easier than the ASM PEs, though TIA is usually more representative
02: 28 / 35
03: 32 / 35 - Probably easiest yet, though high potential for stupid mistakes
04: 29 / 35
05: 29 / 35 - Tricky, lots of subtleties

General trend compared to ASM: TIA less computationally intense, less "rare" topics, but has more subtleties (with the wrong answers available). Put another way: ASM has more room for computational mistakes and outright cluelessness. TIA has me thinking "hmm it could be this one or this one, depends on a subtle aspect that I'm not remembering clearly".

TIA seemed to have a disproportionate number of questions on Coherence - 1 each exam almost? ASM had 1 or 2 total on Coherence in 10 exams. ASM has a bunch of single pareto PE problems, whereas I don't think TIA has any.

One surprise: of the 15 PEs, no questions on tail weight (that I can remember).

[Staky41]

Does anyone have Mahler PE scores?
I'm doing better at ASM exams than Mahler now - stupid mistakes...

[JoeSpo]

Originally Posted by Josia

PE Scores thus far:

ASM version 11

01: 28 / 35
02: 26 / 35
03: 26 / 35 (this one was more challenging than the score shows - was lucky)
04: 28 / 35
05: 29 / 35
06: 28 / 35
07: 30 / 35 (overall easier exam, though had a few oddball questions)
08: 29 / 35 (tricky questions. 2 stupid last step calc mistakes :/ )
09:
10:

holy MOLY! I smell a 10