At long last, the Analysis of Past Exams spreadsheet in the Supplementary Materials section has been fully updated! This was a major revision to our spreadsheet because of all the syllabus changes that took place for this first sitting of LPM.
We’ve taken the opportunity to review hundreds of past questions across multiple FSA tracks (from ILA to QFI) to find as many relevant past problems as possible. We’ve also organized published SOA exams from different exam “eras” on the SOA Exams tab of the course so that you don’t have to individually download all of those PDFs from the SOA’s site.
The purpose of the Analysis of Past Exams spreadsheet is to break down every relevant exam question going back to the early 2000s. There are currently over 350 individual sub-questions (about 50 hours in point value) still on syllabus. This is way more than the average person can (or should) work, but one way to use it is to look for problems from specific readings (e.g. calculation type problems).
In addition to breaking down past questions to the sub-question level, along with point value, question type (verbal vs. calculation), source reading, and topic, the new version of the spreadsheet also shows problems by lesson. In other words, we’ve included a layout of our LPM course and mapped relevant problems to each lesson. This is just another perspective that you can use to reference past SOA problems as you progress through the course.
Just be careful with your time. Sometimes I see people spend weeks and weeks working these older exam problems. While there are certainly many relevant questions in those older exams, the problem is that you will end up spending many hours practicing a fairly small percentage of the current syllabus, which is quite different from past syllabi.
Another pitfall to avoid: Do NOT use this spreadsheet as a prediction tool for future exams. The testing frequency of past readings is highly biased toward readings that have been on the syllabi the longest. Some readings have been on the ILA syllabi for over a decade, while MANY others have been added only in the last year.
Also, please remember that we have solutions for many past problems posted on the SOA Exams tab of the online seminar.