Hello! Welcome to the first official MAS-I blog post!
I currently estimate that over 70% of the lessons for MAS-I are already complete – that means that these are exam S lessons that do not need to be changed or updated since the syllabus treatment for those topics has not changed from exam S to MAS-I. This is all of B.1-B.4, all of section E, and most of C.1-C.3.
What this means is that if you are starting today, and following the automatic schedule that pops up in the lesson menu when you set your start and exam dates as indicated in the tour video, there is a chance that you will never even notice that construction is taking place.
My hope is that I will stay far enough ahead of you so that the lessons will all be available by the time that you get to them on the schedule.
The first stage of the construction process will be additions to the non-extended-linear-models material. There will be either 7 or 8 such lessons, forming the new B.5.1-B.5.3, C.1.8-C.1.10, C.2.9, and maybe one more lesson. I expect these to go up over the course of the next month.
The second stage is the extended linear models (ELM) material. Although still subject to some changes, this will entail:
- Updating D.1 to include more background material on modeling. (ISLR chapter 1 and 2 – probably two new lessons with some modifications to the current D.1 lessons)
- Overhauling D.4 to integrate the new content from ISLR chapters 5 and 6. (8-10 lessons)
- Adding a new section D.5 on the Generalized Additive Models. (7-9 new lessons)
These lessons will start rolling out in January, and likely finish up during February.
I’ll be trying to get at least a couple of first pass problems up to accompany each of these lessons when the lesson goes live. Then, as soon as the last lesson is live, I’ll head back into each lesson to develop more practice problems.
The last stage of construction will be the sample exams, which will roll out the month leading up to the exam on May 7th.
The lessons that transfer in from Exam S have been used by many candidates already, so many of the errors from those lessons have already been caught and removed. It will likely be some time before the new lessons reach that level – so please keep an eye out for problems and let me know as soon as you see anything that doesn’t seem correct. Also, because I fix errors as soon as they are found, you may want to hold off on printing the documents for the new lessons until just before you are ready to do that lesson. That way, you will be sure to be using the most up-to-date lesson handouts all the time.
As always, please feel free to send me any questions that you have, or post your question on the forum. I try to answer all questions within two business days, and usually much faster.