LAM Syllabus Changes – Fall 2022

The SOA just released the new LAM syllabus for Fall 2022. Overall, the changes were small. They added one new reading and made no other changes for this sitting. The new reading is:

Standards of Practice, Canadian Institute of Actuaries Actuarial Standards Board, 2022, 1440-1490

Which FSA Exam Should I Take: LAM or ERM?

One question we often get from students is whether we recommend they take LAM or ERM to fulfill the 2 or 4 hour FSA exam requirement. We thought it would be helpful to organize our thoughts in this blog post. As you would probably guess, there is no one-size-fits-all answer, and we will outline the main considerations below. Eddie and me (Zak) have co-taught ERM and LRM/LAM for a while now, so we do think we can definitely give you some helpful guidance here.

First, if you are looking for a shorter exam, then you want LAM. Not only is the ERM syllabus much longer, but also ERM has a case study and LAM does not.

Here is a rough sketch of what you’re looking at:

LAM Syllabus ~ 800 source material pages

ERM Syllabus ~1200 source material pages + 200 page case study

Above are “source material pages” meaning the actual readings the SOA puts on the syllabus. This is not the number of pages for the TIA study manuals, but they are roughly similar proportions. Please note that these are approximate figures, and they do change over time, but this should give you a good general idea of the relative syllabus size.

As far as difficulty, since the exams are on a curve it does come down to relative performance. I would recommend downloading a few past exams and glancing at them. You might get a feel which is easier to you after looking at a few past SOA exams. For me, LAM is simpler – it might require a bit more technical knowledge of the life track, but that’s something I enjoy. ERM, on the other hand, is much more verbose – the questions can often span 3 pages. The case study for ERM takes a significant amount of preparation and effort. There is no case study for LAM so that will save you time. The case study is a major factor to consider.

I figured it’s also good to discuss potential challenges with LAM to fully lay out both sides. LAM is a newer exam so there won’t be as many past SOA exam questions to practice with. LAM started in 2019 compared to ERM which started in 2012. The other challenge is that since LAM is only a 2 hour exam, you run the risk of failing from “bombing one question”. You have a bit more of a cushion with ERM since it’s a 4 hour exam.

It may be worth briefly mentioning that the SOA LAM exams have had some quality issues. In particular, for the Spring 2021 exam, the SOA had to throw out 4 out of 40 points. When studying for any FSA exam, understand that the past SOA questions and solutions are often not perfect. They are written by volunteers with busy full time-jobs. Often the question and solution creating process goes through many iterations; there can be communication breakdowns in this process which lead to errors.

We also wanted to mention that LAM and ERM have very small overlap in terms of syllabus readings. Years ago, there was more of an overlap between the exams. Currently, there are just a few readings that crossover between the exams. You can essentially think of them as entirely separate exams with separate syllabi.

These links might also be helpful:

http://theinfiniteactuary.com/blogs/exam_ila_lrm/2018/04/26/lp-lfv-lrm-or-erm-which-should-i-take-first/

http://theinfiniteactuary.com/blogs/exam_ila_lrm/2019/07/10/what-does-it-take-to-pass-an-fsa-exam/

To summarize, we recommend doing the following to help guide your decision:

  • For both LAM & ERM, check out a few past exams on the SOA website to get a feel for what might be a better fit for you
  • Look through the TIA product page and samples
  • Open the SOA syllabus for each exam. Skim through it, and even feel free to click some of the links to syllabus readings. You don’t need to read them, but you can skim through them to get a feel for the material covered on each exam
  • Consider your backgrounds and interests. You’ll be spending a lot of time studying for the exam you choose, so pick one that you can see yourself being motivated to allocate enough study time for
  • Talk to other actuaries who have taken either exam to get their perspective

Here’s a list of pros/cons which you may find helpful. Keep in mind this is just our opinion!

Pro LAM

Pro ERM

  • More established exam (since 2012), meaning more past exam questions, etc.
  • “Bombing one question” does not pull down your score as much since the exam is 80 points for ERM instead of 40 points for LAM.

Lastly, we highly recommend once you make a decision to not second guess yourself. Make a well-informed choice of which exam to take, and then go for at it with 100% effort. We hope this helps you decide and good luck on your FSA exams!

 

 

LAM Syllabus Changes – Fall 2021

The SOA released the updated LAM syllabus today for the Fall 2021 / Spring 2022 exams. Overall the changes were small – with just two readings added and two removed. We will update the seminar over the coming weeks for these changes.

There were no changes to Sections A/C/D. All changes below are Section B only.

Add
1. LAM-149: Application of Professional Judgement by Actuaries, 2020
2. Assumption Governance, The Actuary, Jan 2021

Remove
1. LAM-145 Expert Judgment
2. Making Spreadsheets Great Again

Update to Prometric folder format

If you are registered with the SOA to take a spring 2021 FSA exam, you should have gotten an email from the SOA recently about an update to the way file folders on Prometric workstations will be named (PDF link). These instructions seem to be coming directly from Prometric and are slightly different from the Prometric video posted on the SOA’s YouTube channel earlier this month. However, the changes seem to be only cosmetic—nothing too major.

My advice is to pay attention to the name of the folder where your working files are stored on the computer. These files should already be pre-loaded when you start the exam. As long as you know the location of these files, it should not be hard to find them when uploading. Fortunately, there is an entire 5-minute section dedicated to uploading files at the end, so hopefully it will all be very straightforward.

SOA releases updated Prometric video

Today, the SOA released an updated video covering the Prometric setup for the spring 2021 exams. Please make some time to watch this video before you take the exam.

The key change for spring is that the SOA has created a new, distinct 5-minute session for you to use solely for submitting your exam files (Word and Excel file). This is in addition to the time provided for taking the exam. The time allotted for taking the exam is identical to before: 5 hours, 15 minutes for LPM and LFM; 4 hours, 15 minutes for ERM; and 2 hours, 15 minutes for LAM. In other words, you’ll have an additional 5 minutes on top of these times to use just for submitting your files. This is good news and likely intended to alleviate some of the issues that happened last fall when people ran out of time before they were able to submit their files (although it seems the SOA was able to recover those files anyway).

Excel feature availability in Prometric

I’ve gotten an uptick in email in recent days asking which features will be available in Excel in Prometric. Each exam page on the SOA’s site links to the most recent information on this (PDF here). In particular, several people have asked me if Goal Seek will be available. The answer is yes. However, Solver is not available (as noted in the PDF). But to be absolutely clear, you will have access to Goal Seek, which can be useful for IRR-type calculations.

Thoughts on the Prometric CBT exam experience

I recently joined two of our other instructors, Zak Fischer and Derek Brace, on a recorded Zoom call to talk about the Prometric exam experience so far as well as other topics listed below. You can check it out on YouTube. Let us know if there are other topics or questions you’d like us to talk about sometime!

  • Overall thoughts on the first sitting of FSA Prometric Exams
  • Special characters in file names / upload problems
  • “Reading period” / “break” / time available for exam / different time slots 
  • Overview of existing resources available to help prepare for CBT exams
  • Key takeaways from the TIA survey
  • How does the change to CBT exams impact time management?
  • Role of Excel
  • Typing formulas in Word
  • Looking towards future sittings: how might the Prometric FSA experience evolve over time
  • How FSA exams are different from preliminary exams

If you have issues uploading your exam files at Prometric…

Good news… today I was told by someone (that I trust a lot) in the SOA education function that the Word and Excel exam files can usually be recovered directly from the Prometric workstation if there are issues uploading. If you end up having any issue whatsoever uploading your Word and Excel files on exam day, you can contact [email protected] to let them know, and the SOA most likely will be able to recover the files.