Many people have been wondering how Exam C compares to the new SOA exam STAM. They have about a 70% overlap, with the biggest changes between C and STAM being that Empirical Estimators (section C of the old C seminar) and simulation (section F) have been removed, and replaced with some new topics on health and property and casualty insurance. There are also some smaller changes, with things like Extreme Value Distribution (old lesson A.4.5), percentile matching (D.1.1) and method of moments (D.1.2) also being removed.

In terms of how the TIA C seminar compares to the STAM seminar, Sections A and B are fairly similar so if you have started those in the C seminar, there is no need to rewatch those lessons in the STAM seminar. The lesson that is most different in those sections is A.3.5, in which I’ve included a 2nd approach using raw moments to find the variances. After that, the STAM seminar has more differences from C. The removal of Empirical estimators means that Parametric estimators has been moved from Section D to C, and the old chapter D.1 has also been removed. The simpler cases of the method of moments are still useful in shortcuts for maximum likelihood estimators and are now discussed in the relevant pieces of the MLE chapter.

Lessons on the new material are still being completed. Currently the STAM seminar includes everything through Classical Credibility. Lessons on the remainder of credibility will be completed by the end of May, and lessons on the new insurance topics will be completed by the end of June.

In terms of the relative difficulty of the two exams, the new material is potentially broader in scope, but the sample problems that the SOA has released so far are easier than the questions that were given on the removed material. That does not mean that the actual exam will end up being easier, as the sample problems and exam questions aren’t always written by the same people. I will be writing problems that try to include potential wrinkles not yet in the SOA samples to help prepare you for whatever they can throw at you.

For CAS students, C and MAS-II are very different exams, and I will discuss that some other time.