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<p style=”text-align: left;”>Based on a recent conversation, I can unofficially but almost certainly confirm that graders have submitted their stuff. Not sure what that means for timing.</p>
For the past two years, Fall results took 6 weeks to come out which implies it could be as early as two weeks from tomorrow if they indeed started right after 12/9. Mid to late February is a bit of a stretch. Exams are in the first week of May.
Interesting. Even before they decided to extend the window to the 31st, I heard through the grapevine from someone connected to one of the graders that the graders never had anything due until the end of January. Time will tell I guess.
Take my advice with a grain of salt since I’m awaiting results for both. I’ve taken Exam 7 three times now and Exam 9 twice. The material for 9 is more enjoyable since it can be applied to your real life but 7 is still very intriguing. In my opinion, the material for 9 is more straightforward to understand. The reserving in 7 (65%-65% of the weight) isn’t too bad but there are a few technical papers that are super time consuming and have a relatively low point value. The ERM section is also grossly disproportionate in terms of its point value relative to the amount of source material (very time consuming for 15-20%). In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter which you take first since you’ll have to take both. Good luck with your choice.
I get the comment about saving time but I partially disagree in terms of the efficiency given the inconsistencies with Excel. One of the most basic ones was that the absolute reference shortcut in Excel doesn’t translate to the technology-based environment. At least for me, the gains were at least offset by the glitches and inconsistencies. And I’m super fast in Excel in general.
Someone was asking me if you think they care about the fact that this year was COVID and all that’s happened and might adjust for that. My answer was simple: Nope.
I think it could go one of two ways and that’s assuming that the candidate pool systematically underperformed (ex. a large number of candidates didn’t finish). Either they lower the MQC as they presumably did for Exam 8 in 2018 or they leave it as is and have a lower pass rate as they did for Exam 5 last year (29% I believe).
There’s another key variable to consider as well which no one can really answer. That is, how did COVID impact preparations? Were most candidates unaffected and able to study twice as much, were twice and prepared and overperformed, were some candidates heavily impacted and as a result, underperformed or something in between?
I’m inclined to believe most candidates were unaffected given how much younger the candidate pool is nowadays (less likely to be married, have kids and other forms of additional dependencies and stress etc.)
Only time will tell.
TIA for 9 is more or less standard and comprehensive in its coverage. There aren’t any exceptional options out there that I’m personally aware of for 9 other than Goldfarb back in the day. I used TIA and think I’m probably on the fence. Anything I missed on the exam was more attributable to lack of sharpness and time management than anything else. I would recommend it.
I hate to say it but there are gonna be some angry people when results come out. I guarantee that whatever happens, the people who fail and happened to have technical issues are gonna blame it on that and since the CAS doesn’t reveal how they address that situation, no one will know if any adjustments were made. Pretty much, unless they release an official statement saying that they factored technical issues into the grading across the board, people are gonna feel cheated. Nothing’s going to change but they’ll get some complaints.
I really hope they can make some adjustment for you. I wonder how they handle these situations. For instance, if you left three questions blank because of time, would they know which three questions they were? And if someone else had a technical issue and lost time but the questions they couldn’t do had a higher point value, how do they make the adjustments fair? Also, what if some people weren’t aware of the grievance form? I certainly wasn’t. This whole thing is a mess. Im just glad I’m not the one who has to try clean it up.
Sorry to hear about your experience. While I never had any technical issues that prevented me from inputting answers, I had temporary glitches (ex. There’s an error in Excel where when you backspace, it deletes the characters in the opposite direction and there were a few other issues with copy paste and other miscellaneous issues).
I’m convinced these errors cost me time and I wasn’t able to finish the exam. I wonder if in general, the CAS will contemplate the computer-based environment in their grading. Im aware that it does enhance things to some degree but the environment wasn’t identical to Excel.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
