Last week, the SOA posted some very important additional information on each exam page regarding the format of the new CBT exams. We strongly encourage you to review this information the SOA provided. The new information the SOA released includes:
- Sample CBT questions and solutions are posted on each exam page, including an Excel file for calculation-based solutions
- Additional details about the Prometric environment, including a list of Word/Excel features and keyboard shortcuts that will NOT be available. Be sure to review these carefully!
- An SOA video simulating the exam-day experience will be made at a later date
A few initial thoughts and observations:
- The word file will contain an answer box right after each question sub-part. This will make it easier to reference that part of the question visually while answering.
- Each question will tell you which parts will be answered in Excel or Word. If a part of a question is answered in Excel, then any interpretations/analysis of your calculations will also be in Excel. In other words, you will put all of your formulas, calculations, and any additional wording to interpret your results or state a conclusion entirely in the Excel file. As a result, you won’t have to spread your solution across both Word and Excel.
- You will be able to copy/paste between Word and Excel. For example, if a problem in Word provides a table of values, you will be able to copy those into Excel (or vice versa). It also appears that problems that provide data in Word seem to repeat that data in Excel for your convenience. It’s possible future questions will contain additional data exclusively in Excel for certain problems.
Going forward, we will work on developing more CBT based questions for the IRM exam to provide more practice with using Excel and the new exam format.
Keep working hard during October!