There are going to be a number of changes to Exam 4/C beginning with the Fall 2009 sitting. The most obvious one is that the exam is changing from a 40 question, 4 hour paper and pencil exam to a 35 question, 3 1/2 hour CBT exam. This also means that the syllabus is changing, mostly for the shorter. The syllabus changes are as follows:
- Everything from Derivatives Markets is being moved to exam 3F/MFE
- The Cox model and general linear models are being removed from the syllabus
- Ruin theory is being removed from the syllabus
- The Risk Measures text is changing from the Hardy study note to the 3rd edition of Loss Models. This means that the terminology is changing slightly and some of the material is being removed
- The 2nd edition of Loss Models is no longer an acceptable reference for the exam (which is good because the 3rd edition is better)
- A learning objective applying (a,b,1) models has been specifically added to the syllabus. This is something that was implicitly on the syllabus before, but I guess will mean that (a,b,1) models will be emphasized more on the actual exam.
To address these changes, I am removing what was section C.4 (moving the old C.5 up), F.1, F.3, and much of E.2. That is a total of about 8 lessons that are being removed. I am going to add 2 lessons that go into normal and lognormal distributions (and conjugate priors) more deeply than before since they were tested so heavily this spring. I will also add a section of review lessons, and rerecord the risk measures lessons (what was F.2, and will be F.1) plus the lesson on (a,b,1) distributions. Most of these changes are in the second half of the seminar, so they should be completed well before you get to them.
I will also be adding some more practice problems and practice exams. The new problems will be indicated on the answer sheet by being in a different color than the old problems.
dave Admin, new files
I have to leave town tomorrow for a family emergency and am therefore cancelling my Saturday office hours. I will be back either Monday or Tuesday during the day, so I expect that I will still have office hours on Tuesday.
dave Announcements
Since May 14th is rapidly approaching, I am going to start holding online office hours. We are starting to experiment with ways to do this, and the webconferencing software that I will be using is limited to relatively small groups of people. As a result, if you want to attend one of the office hours session, please send me e-mail and I can give you the login information. Everything will run through a Java applet on your web browser, so you may need to install a Java plugin first (I had to do so in Chrome, but not in my other browsers).
My office hour times will be: Wednesday, 5/6 from 3-4 pm EDT, Saturday 5/9 from noon-1pm EDT and from 8-9 pm EDT, and Tuesday 5/12 from 10-11 pm EDT. (Note: the Saturday office hours have been cancelled–see the newer post). I will try to record the office hour sessions for those who can’t make any of those times, but I haven’t figured out how well that will work (I think that the audio will only pick up me so questions won’t make it through).
I also wanted to give you a revised formula_sheet v2. There are 2 typos that are corrected from the earlier version: the definition of conditional probability had the wrong set in the denominator, and the second, more complicated formula for v-hat in the non-parametric credibility section was missing the subscript on X_i-bar.
dave Admin, Announcements, errata
You may be wondering how the practice exams compare to the real exam. That is a hard question to answer as the actual exams have gotten significantly harder since the last published exam. My intention is for the individual questions on my exams to all be reasonable in the sense that all of them could be asked on the real exam. I have also tried to have a somewhat similar blend of topics as appeared on the Spring 2007 exam. On the other hand, the actual exam is a mixture of easy, medium, and hard questions and I tend to have fewer easy questions and therefore more hard questions than the real exam. This makes my exams overall somewhat longer and harder.
Having said that, the Fall 2008 exam was brutal–the pass mark was 22/40 (55%) and the effective pass rate was only 45% meaning that the median was probably 21/40, possibly 20. In the early days of 4/C, the pass mark was often closer to 70%, but even though you needed more questions right to pass, the pass rate was often over 50%, sometimes close to 60%. In the fall of 2007, the passmark was 25/40, and 50% passed, so the median score decreased by 4 questions in 1 year. (The optimistic way to look at this is that the number of questions that you need to get right is probably lower than you might expect.) Overall, there has been a clear attempt by the exam committee to make the exams harder, and I am trying to mimic that. Many of the questions on my practice exams are based on what I know about the questions that appeared on the fall exam.
dave Sample Exams, new files
I’ve posted the first practice exam and solutions (see the 4/C sample exams section). Also up in the sample exams section is the Spring 2007 exam along with my solutions. The Spring 2007 exam is the only published exam based on the current syllabus, and I would save it for a relatively final practice exam as that is the closest that you will come to the difficulty of the actual exam.
The 2nd and 3rd practice exams are a little more than half done, and my plan is to get them out one per week in the next two weeks. I will also try to add a brief review section of a few videos that quickly step through the entire syllabus.
dave Sample Exams, new files
As part of our effort to be more iPhone/iPod friendly, I’ve added a .zip file to the end of almost every section containing .mp3 versions of the audio part of the lessons in that section so you could theoretically listen to them while commuting. Hopefully this will be helpful while reviewing your notes, although I would expect it to be more useful to have mp3 files when memorizing lists for the upper level exams.
dave Uncategorized
Somehow it is already April, which means that the exam is only a month and a half away. There are a few things that you can do to review. One is that the only published exam using the current syllabus was the Spring 2007 Exam. You can find the exam and solutions on the SOA website, and I will also be creating video solutions for this shortly that will go in the 4/C Practice Exams section of our website. I have also created a formula sheet (edit: this has been revised to formula_sheet v2, see above for details) and will be adding a couple of review lessons that briefly step through the formulas. Finally, I will add about 3 practice exams, probably starting within the next two weeks.
dave Uncategorized
As you have probably noticed, we have added a few new features to the website. It now displays for you which lessons you have viewed and not viewed, which should make it easier to keep track of where you are. It will also show you what lessons have been added or updated, which is important as I am still adding (and occasionally correcting) lessons. If the changes aren’t self-explanatory, you can watch a video explaining them that is linked on most pages, and is also at http://www.theinfiniteactuary.com/files/newvideo.wmv If you have comments and suggestions about the new look, please let me know.
One brief comment about the new look is that it only tracks the videos that you have seen since the change (i.e., since 2/15). This means that videos that you viewed earlier will say that they are unviewed. The easiest solution to this is to not care very much, but if you want to have the check marks and an accurate count of the fraction of the lessons that you have viewed, then you can trick the system by opening the videos and close the window as soon as the video starts. Since I am still adding new lessons, I think it probably makes the most sense not to care too much about the total count as it is changing, but obviously you should do whatever works best for you.
dave Announcements, Questions
A few people have asked to have labels on the PDFs in case their hardcopies get separated. I have added a footer in 9 point font on each page of the PDFs in sections B and C, and intend to keep doing so unless people think that this is a bad idea. The main drawback from my point of view is that occasionally the footer runs into some of the equations that I am writing, but this doesn’t happen very often and I think the type face is different enough from the handwriting that I hope it shouldn’t be a problem.
dave Uncategorized
I’ve forgot to include a brief section on franchise deductibles when I originally recorded lesson A.4.4, and have now gone back and added it. The video files are currently recompiling, and will be updated on the website later today (Jan. 21). In general, when I need to go back and add content like this, I will make an update here to let you know about that. With other, smaller typos, my tendency is just to correct them as they come up, but if this starts to be confusing I will update the errata page more aggressively.
dave A, errata