Home Forums SOA Exams 2021 Fall ILA-LAM

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  • #7192
    actuarially decent
    Participant

      Any thoughts on this sitting?  Felt like it was fair for the most part….but I was in a bit of a time crunch unfortunately so it feels like some of my responses are on the lackluster end.  Think I’m borderline.

      #7193
      Q Zeo
      Participant

        I was out of time too. I think the exam length is longer than old written one. Only 40 points in total, not many we can miss.

        #7196
        bouga
        Participant

          I also thought it was a fair exam. The LCG question was a bit weird.

          #7199
          qwer123
          Participant

            I was out of time too. Feeling not good with the excel questions…

            #7202
            jlev85
            Participant

              Hi All, I also felt it was fair, not too challenging but not too easy. Actually, it was pleasant not having to deal with a heavy dose of certain pricing and hedging topic’s, we are familiar with and I will not mention specifically, that I was sure would appear. Overall, the calculation questions seemed reasonable; more straight forward than I have experienced in past sittings for ERM and other exams.

              The premise of the PRNG question was odd. Had issues with  second part of that question trying to line up timing of CF’s. Btw, did anyone else have the unfortunate realization that MMULT function in excel was disabled (i.e. it only produced R1C1 of resulting matrix). That was annoying to say the least.  Also the shortcut CTRL+B was not working to bold text and this wasn’t on the list of disabled shortcuts. Anyone else notice any excel issues?

              Totally not confident with the question with all the charts/graphs. Definitely overthought this one. Anyone else have tough time trying to determine what conclusions they expected us to draw from this,  or even what particular chapter in source material they were hinting at here? Definitely started falling down the rabbit hole of overthinking on this one. (i.e. there is a lot to take away from the graphs but I doubt they expected us to analyze the data so intently). I think for that question I had least confident with my responses.

              p.s.

              Before taking this exam I had actually noticed a trend over the first four sittings where each of the past exams had # tested topics increased from the prior(see attached.png). It seems exam writers are attempting to get more clever with preparing questions that bring in more varied source material for a particular response. Curious have others noticed this trend over past few years as well? If so, your thoughts? Definitely seems to add a level of challenge but also could add level of subjectivity which could be good and bad. For example, sometimes its useful to pull support from various related sources rather than just a verbose listing of bullets but then sometimes may not be straight forward what they are really hinting at or expecting from a particular question. Seemed the latter for that question with the graphs/charts.

               

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              #7205
              DNMMR
              Participant

                MMULT was not disabled… you just can’t simply hit ENTER once you put in the formula. Instead, you need to use CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. I thought the same at first and then realized I didn’t use the combo keys.

                #7206
                bouga
                Participant

                  It was also disabled for me. CTRL+Shift+ENTER was not working.

                  @ jlev85, are you talking about problem 3 tables about cluster analysis?

                  #7210
                  Q Zeo
                  Participant

                    Wondering if anyone manage to not rush and finished everything. Again, I personally left few blanks and not because they are hard but more of time constraints. SOA really needs to understand that when we  constructing excel answer , time flies!

                    #7216
                    DNMMR
                    Participant

                      I just tried MMULT on my computer with Excel 2016, an ENTER key will return the result. However, during the exam I did manage it to work by selecting 4 cells (destination) and pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. I didn’t end up using the matrix to solve the problem anyway but only used it to verify a few probabilities in my case-by-case solution.

                      #7710
                      actuarially decent
                      Participant

                        One month to go….how are we feeling?  I still feel a bit on the fence, mostly because I don’t exactly know how the graders think/grade.

                        #8195
                        DNMMR
                        Participant

                          One week left till we find out!

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