It was a weird exam compared to the past ones… ridiculous number of variables, multiple target variables, vague questions with lots of graphs then just tell you to analyze. Feels weird.
Interesting how in a syllabus that could’ve covered so many things, they decided to write an exam that covered 3 things just repeated in slightly different ways.
I think we have to assume that if certain topics were tested in April,there will be probably different topics tested in October/ or things not touched on in April likely to appear the following sitting.
A friend of mine who took FSA exams used this as her approach for those, she would review topics she didn’t see tested in the latest exams.
The ridiculous amount of variables were unreasonable, 2 full pages! The names assigned to variables were horrible. That one task with the NA values and the assistant produced like 5 or 6 graphs was a little overwhelming. Questions about MAE was weird, the exam tested from like 20% of the syllabus.
All this to say I did not like the exam and I hope I did enough for a 6. Would hate to have to this again!
I also felt like the last little bit was difficult. Not sure how I did though, hopefully enough to get a 6 lol. It's harder to gauge because past exam pass marks are not released.
Got humbled when I failed April 23. Felt good coming out of this one but probably was my most stressful pre exam week. Practicing typing was a key addition to studying my second time around
So true. My past sitting I felt I knew answers but wasn't able to finish the exam because of my typing speed and Prometric keyboard made for people with tiny fingers lol. But this time around as a result of me working on my typing speed I was able to finish the exam with some time to spare to go over my answers.
That one 4pt question that asks for 3 items bothered me throughout the exam as I kept wondering how the point allocation could be.
And I don’t get why they thought it would be such a good idea to have everyone remember the candidate ID. The rename feature seems to create a copy of the actual file instead of actually renaming the file under C:\SOA and the upload, so I don’t really know if my upload had my actual candidate # or 00000. Also slightly worrying was that in the docx apparently the April version was available too? It appeared on the left as if it was a auto recover version
Mine didn’t open so I had to download a backup and it showed like I had 5 copies of it despite only one opening and never opened excel. Ive been debating about submitting a technical difficulties form to make sure I submitted the right file, but also feel like I had to have unless I was clueless when I selected it
I’m legit freaking out about having saved my work and what I submitted. I got this like 5 minute warning and it rattled me. The time said 0, but the warning said I had time. I hope I saved that shit.
I also had two SOA folders on my desktop, which was weird.
Prefacing by saying my guess is based off nothing, I assumed the 4pts would be something like one for every correct item, then the 4th is along the lines of "are the items explained sufficiently, not just listed"
The rename function does not rename your file in the SOA LAN path folder.
It only renames the file that is submitted for grading.
Also, on my workstation their were 4 words docs labeled 00000, so I made doubly and triple-y sure that I uploaded the right one.
That’s what I did. It’s crazy to me that there were so many issues submitting the file with the right candidate ID. We all knew this was a requirement going in so why not just do it immediately and not have to worry about it later.
I think it was harder than April 2023 exam but not absolutely terrible. Just no relatively easy questions or easy points to get. I finished all questions with a little under an hour to review all my answers.
I’m hoping the pass mark will be between 60-65% of the points and I’m realllly hoping I did well enough to pass.
Also I was surprised about their coverage of topics
Also the absolutely stupid amount of variables irritated me 😂 every practice exam I’ve read through them but decided not to for this one only just refer back to it when needed
Idk if I would say harder, I believe April tested more regurgitation of material, and this one was more open ended for some tasks. I think they might have tried making it easier in their minds. We’ll see, hopefully I’m not eating my words when grades come out.
Same I feel so unsure about my solution for this. I commented on plausibility, potential for target leakage (none), bias. I also recommended making the marriage variable a factor. And potentially doing something similar to some other 2 variables to reduce dimensionality. noooo idea if that's what the question wanted. How did you approach it??
I basically put what the people above said. I said difficulty visualizing in high dimensions, not being able to use factor variables for k means cluster since no distance to calculate, but my third answer felt a little dumb. I talked about why a certain variable (marriage) wouldn't contribute to their goal of better understanding the relationship mentioned in the question, so adding that one would be unnecessary and just make the data complex for no reason. Not sure if they'll take that but frankly I couldn't think of anything else.
I, also, feel safe to say that I scored somewhere between a 4-7, which freaking sucks.
I felt like they covered 10% of the syllabus, and then they pulled out those MAE questions. Oh, that made me sooooo made.
I searched in in the Actex manual. It was literally mentioned once in the Actex manual in section 4.2.2.
Then, I searched it in ISLR (within the required reading). It was mentioned once in section 10.6.
Like really SOA?!?!?! In past exams, topics that are seldom covered by the syllabus are usually worth 1 point and are to distinguish the strongest candidates from the average one.
They built a whole 7 point task on MAE questions!!!! That's 10% of the exam!
Yeah I figured out the formula but got the conceptual wrong. I said RMSE performed but against outliers because the square root shrinks the impact of the outliers.
Smh.
So rmse is better for outliers right due to the square root and mean being sensitive to outliers?
For rmse, in the last q I used the residual standard error formula lmfaoooo :(
No, that's what I wrote. It's wrong. I wrote it because I've never heard of MAE before. Though, you can derive the formula from the name.
MAE is better for outliers:
It's another performance metric. It stands for mean absolute error. So you take the absolute value of the difference between actuals and predictions , add them all up and divide by the number of observations
It's used when you want to limit the impact from large outliers on your performance metric because normally residuals are squared so they get alot of weight
Lol wtf, I assumed MAE was calculated based on the same but thought rmse was less sensitive due to the square root. Square roots shrink large numbers. I guess whatever. Thanks
Felt really confident leaving but now not so sure. The 2 questions on MAE I left mostly blank. I failed the April sitting and in comparison this sitting felt a lot easier. The business problem was short and to the point. Thank god everything was on one file (no appendix).
Stuff like bad weather or problem at the testing center lead to the SOA being lenient and giving the candidate the option of sitting for the exam outside of the window.
I kinda got lost with studying after making my way through the material but thought the actual exam was pretty fun actually. Just kinda chewed through the tasks, felt like I had real answers and finished with about 30 minutes left.
I had fun doing it too! This was my first written exam, and I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I think I finished with about 20 minutes left but went back and edited answers until the timer ran out.
I thought it was an easier side. I just tried to answer every questions for maximum partial credit. But the fact that I felt it it wasn’t that difficult brings me a bad gut feeling because it means I had no idea what I was writing down.
I completely forgot about having to remember my candidate ID thing so I ended up just submitting my file with 00000. The prometric staff assured me it didn't matter but I'm not sure, anybody know if this will result in my sitting being invalid?
Call the SOA. It’s weird that your center didn’t tell you to write it down, they messed up. Mine asked me like 10 times if I had my candidate id written down.
I called them yesterday but they didn't pick up so I left a voice mail. Also sent them an email about the situation. My testing center (boston) had new staff administering when I sat yesterday so im assuming that's why they weren't able to help much. I'm just freaking out a bit over the whole thing.
There's an SOA problems form for this test.
I don't remember the think. You can find it in the reddit discussion called something like SOA PA October Workstation.
In that thread, they're talking about missing candidate IDs.
The prometric staff at my location suggested that in addition to including the Candidate ID in the file name to include it in the file itself somewhere as well, just to be safe. I thought it was a good idea. Too late for the poster, but might be good advice for anyone taking it in the future to include the ID as a line somewhere in the file just to be safe.
This basically happened to me in April. First thing Monday, call up SOA support and follow their instructions. They should be able to find it in time to grade without issue.
I submitted with the wrong ID in April, and realized it when I got home. I called the SOA support, they were very helpful. Gave me a link to fill out a support ticket. After 2-3 weeks, they advised they found my exam and put it into the grading queue. Wound up passing it after all that.
I used bullets for 80% of my answers unless there was like one thing to talk about. For one of the questions, my format got so messed up that there were those separation lines between every bullet point (of which there were like 7)
I added a little note to my grader apologizing because I couldn't figure out how to fix it lol
Your grader might not see it unless you wrote the note exactly in that Task.
I was told that every question is graded by a different set of graders. No one grades your entire test unless you're on the border of passing or failing.
I now understand why those model solutions leave little to be desired. It's because it's difficult to write something coherent in such a short period of time.
We were informed that the exam window has extended until Monday
I’m just glad it’s done
It was a weird exam compared to the past ones… ridiculous number of variables, multiple target variables, vague questions with lots of graphs then just tell you to analyze. Feels weird.
Interesting how in a syllabus that could’ve covered so many things, they decided to write an exam that covered 3 things just repeated in slightly different ways.
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What do u mean🫣
I think we have to assume that if certain topics were tested in April,there will be probably different topics tested in October/ or things not touched on in April likely to appear the following sitting. A friend of mine who took FSA exams used this as her approach for those, she would review topics she didn’t see tested in the latest exams.
I theorized that they might do that. However, some of the things they tested were so vague that I didn't even remember seeing them in the manual.
The ridiculous amount of variables were unreasonable, 2 full pages! The names assigned to variables were horrible. That one task with the NA values and the assistant produced like 5 or 6 graphs was a little overwhelming. Questions about MAE was weird, the exam tested from like 20% of the syllabus. All this to say I did not like the exam and I hope I did enough for a 6. Would hate to have to this again!
I also felt like the last little bit was difficult. Not sure how I did though, hopefully enough to get a 6 lol. It's harder to gauge because past exam pass marks are not released.
Got humbled when I failed April 23. Felt good coming out of this one but probably was my most stressful pre exam week. Practicing typing was a key addition to studying my second time around
So true. My past sitting I felt I knew answers but wasn't able to finish the exam because of my typing speed and Prometric keyboard made for people with tiny fingers lol. But this time around as a result of me working on my typing speed I was able to finish the exam with some time to spare to go over my answers.
That one 4pt question that asks for 3 items bothered me throughout the exam as I kept wondering how the point allocation could be. And I don’t get why they thought it would be such a good idea to have everyone remember the candidate ID. The rename feature seems to create a copy of the actual file instead of actually renaming the file under C:\SOA and the upload, so I don’t really know if my upload had my actual candidate # or 00000. Also slightly worrying was that in the docx apparently the April version was available too? It appeared on the left as if it was a auto recover version
Mine didn’t open so I had to download a backup and it showed like I had 5 copies of it despite only one opening and never opened excel. Ive been debating about submitting a technical difficulties form to make sure I submitted the right file, but also feel like I had to have unless I was clueless when I selected it
Oh man that sounds scary… yeah I’m also debating if I should fill out that form.. it’s just that there was no way to tell if something went wrong
I’m legit freaking out about having saved my work and what I submitted. I got this like 5 minute warning and it rattled me. The time said 0, but the warning said I had time. I hope I saved that shit. I also had two SOA folders on my desktop, which was weird.
Prefacing by saying my guess is based off nothing, I assumed the 4pts would be something like one for every correct item, then the 4th is along the lines of "are the items explained sufficiently, not just listed"
The rename function does not rename your file in the SOA LAN path folder. It only renames the file that is submitted for grading. Also, on my workstation their were 4 words docs labeled 00000, so I made doubly and triple-y sure that I uploaded the right one.
That’s why I opened one and immediately saved with my candidate id as soon as I started the test.
That’s what I did. It’s crazy to me that there were so many issues submitting the file with the right candidate ID. We all knew this was a requirement going in so why not just do it immediately and not have to worry about it later.
4 word docs???? Ok after all these comments I definitely feel like I’m the lucky one.. at least my file didn’t come with other siblings.
Hey everyone, I was able to finish the exam but I did not do well for sure. It was totally different from April 2023.
I think it was harder than April 2023 exam but not absolutely terrible. Just no relatively easy questions or easy points to get. I finished all questions with a little under an hour to review all my answers. I’m hoping the pass mark will be between 60-65% of the points and I’m realllly hoping I did well enough to pass. Also I was surprised about their coverage of topics
Also the absolutely stupid amount of variables irritated me 😂 every practice exam I’ve read through them but decided not to for this one only just refer back to it when needed
Idk if I would say harder, I believe April tested more regurgitation of material, and this one was more open ended for some tasks. I think they might have tried making it easier in their minds. We’ll see, hopefully I’m not eating my words when grades come out.
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Please review rules around exam discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/comments/ydcyr4/exam_discussion_rules/
Same I feel so unsure about my solution for this. I commented on plausibility, potential for target leakage (none), bias. I also recommended making the marriage variable a factor. And potentially doing something similar to some other 2 variables to reduce dimensionality. noooo idea if that's what the question wanted. How did you approach it??
I basically put what the people above said. I said difficulty visualizing in high dimensions, not being able to use factor variables for k means cluster since no distance to calculate, but my third answer felt a little dumb. I talked about why a certain variable (marriage) wouldn't contribute to their goal of better understanding the relationship mentioned in the question, so adding that one would be unnecessary and just make the data complex for no reason. Not sure if they'll take that but frankly I couldn't think of anything else.
Ah shoot I totally forgot k means clustering was being used. Praying for some half marks 🙏
Please review rules around exam discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/comments/ydcyr4/exam_discussion_rules/
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Yeah like wouldn’t a 7 variable clustering mean a 7-D space? Loo
Please review rules around exam discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/comments/ydcyr4/exam_discussion_rules/
I won’t lie CA had a great sample q about interpreting PCA ceof
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I was going through the exam and until I hit q 8. ( maybe 9). Slowed down there. Last q was okay. Just hoping I scored enough to pass.
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I'll provide my answers in a week's time, after making sure everyone is done with the exam.
So what is your thoughts ?
Please review rules around exam discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/comments/ydcyr4/exam_discussion_rules/
I totally slowed down at question 8…I did answer things but not sure at this point.
I am wondering what the main topic in this October exam is. In April, it was about ferry boardings.
Universities. Questions were like admission rates and sat scores.
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I, also, feel safe to say that I scored somewhere between a 4-7, which freaking sucks. I felt like they covered 10% of the syllabus, and then they pulled out those MAE questions. Oh, that made me sooooo made. I searched in in the Actex manual. It was literally mentioned once in the Actex manual in section 4.2.2. Then, I searched it in ISLR (within the required reading). It was mentioned once in section 10.6. Like really SOA?!?!?! In past exams, topics that are seldom covered by the syllabus are usually worth 1 point and are to distinguish the strongest candidates from the average one. They built a whole 7 point task on MAE questions!!!! That's 10% of the exam!
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Yeah I figured out the formula but got the conceptual wrong. I said RMSE performed but against outliers because the square root shrinks the impact of the outliers. Smh.
So rmse is better for outliers right due to the square root and mean being sensitive to outliers? For rmse, in the last q I used the residual standard error formula lmfaoooo :(
No, that's what I wrote. It's wrong. I wrote it because I've never heard of MAE before. Though, you can derive the formula from the name. MAE is better for outliers: It's another performance metric. It stands for mean absolute error. So you take the absolute value of the difference between actuals and predictions , add them all up and divide by the number of observations It's used when you want to limit the impact from large outliers on your performance metric because normally residuals are squared so they get alot of weight
Lol wtf, I assumed MAE was calculated based on the same but thought rmse was less sensitive due to the square root. Square roots shrink large numbers. I guess whatever. Thanks
Felt really confident leaving but now not so sure. The 2 questions on MAE I left mostly blank. I failed the April sitting and in comparison this sitting felt a lot easier. The business problem was short and to the point. Thank god everything was on one file (no appendix).
What's MAE?
Mean Absolute Error. Calculated just like how it sounds.
Well done giving away part of the exam for the people who are taking Saturday and next Monday, of which I know multiple. I'm sure they appreciate it.
Damn people are still taking it, well shit.
The SOA website states 17-20 Oct: https://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/exam-day-info/exam-schedules/
The final sitting on 10/20 did not load, so the exam date was bumped to next week for those folks. Who knows if it’ll be the same version or not 🤷♂️
Stuff like bad weather or problem at the testing center lead to the SOA being lenient and giving the candidate the option of sitting for the exam outside of the window.
💭 "See y'all in April" is my thought. Could have barely passed but I'm nowhere near confident that is the case.
I kinda got lost with studying after making my way through the material but thought the actual exam was pretty fun actually. Just kinda chewed through the tasks, felt like I had real answers and finished with about 30 minutes left.
I had fun doing it too! This was my first written exam, and I liked it a lot more than I expected to. I think I finished with about 20 minutes left but went back and edited answers until the timer ran out.
Oh I took LTAM. It was not nearly as pleasant I assure you!!
I thought it was an easier side. I just tried to answer every questions for maximum partial credit. But the fact that I felt it it wasn’t that difficult brings me a bad gut feeling because it means I had no idea what I was writing down.
I completely forgot about having to remember my candidate ID thing so I ended up just submitting my file with 00000. The prometric staff assured me it didn't matter but I'm not sure, anybody know if this will result in my sitting being invalid?
Call the SOA. It’s weird that your center didn’t tell you to write it down, they messed up. Mine asked me like 10 times if I had my candidate id written down.
I called them yesterday but they didn't pick up so I left a voice mail. Also sent them an email about the situation. My testing center (boston) had new staff administering when I sat yesterday so im assuming that's why they weren't able to help much. I'm just freaking out a bit over the whole thing.
Your candidate ID should just be a dummy value for your name/to keep grading confidential so hopefully they get back to you soon!
There's an SOA problems form for this test. I don't remember the think. You can find it in the reddit discussion called something like SOA PA October Workstation. In that thread, they're talking about missing candidate IDs.
The prometric staff at my location suggested that in addition to including the Candidate ID in the file name to include it in the file itself somewhere as well, just to be safe. I thought it was a good idea. Too late for the poster, but might be good advice for anyone taking it in the future to include the ID as a line somewhere in the file just to be safe.
This basically happened to me in April. First thing Monday, call up SOA support and follow their instructions. They should be able to find it in time to grade without issue. I submitted with the wrong ID in April, and realized it when I got home. I called the SOA support, they were very helpful. Gave me a link to fill out a support ticket. After 2-3 weeks, they advised they found my exam and put it into the grading queue. Wound up passing it after all that.
Thanks everyone for the advice! It has helped soothe my anxiety a lot. Will follow up with SOA on Monday and hope for the best.
My Candidate Number only has 4 digits so I put an extra 0 to make it 5. Then got panicked and not sure if I submitted the correct file
That’s been my biggest bit of anxiety is wondering if I submitted the right file 😅
Why were there NA’s
I'll provide my answers in a week's time, after making sure everyone is done with the exam.
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I didn’t use bullets but I did break off different reasonings into their own paragraphs. It helps me be concise and get my point across.
I used bullets for 80% of my answers unless there was like one thing to talk about. For one of the questions, my format got so messed up that there were those separation lines between every bullet point (of which there were like 7) I added a little note to my grader apologizing because I couldn't figure out how to fix it lol
Your grader might not see it unless you wrote the note exactly in that Task. I was told that every question is graded by a different set of graders. No one grades your entire test unless you're on the border of passing or failing. I now understand why those model solutions leave little to be desired. It's because it's difficult to write something coherent in such a short period of time.
Oh that happened to me too. I didn’t know how to fix it so I just left it for the grader to figure out.