I’ve received messages from folks seeking suggestions on how to prepare for the exam, so I thought I should post my thoughts here and on April-exam thread for MLC. My opinions are based on over 25 years of experience in helping people prepare for actuarial exams and careers, both as Director of the actuarial program at UT-Austin (before my 2010 retirement) and as teacher of face-to-face exam-prep “seminars”.
Have you already passed at least a couple of CAS/SoA exams? If so, then my experience says that you have the ability to pass this exam. But not every one with the ability to pass it does in fact pass it. The key, of course, is thorough but effective preparation. As the great basketball coach John Wooden said, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
But what kind of preparation? Here are my recommendations, based on all that experience I mentioned:
1) Design your own unique plan of attack on the exam that builds on your strengths. I like to twist the Wooden quote above and say, “For most people, trying to prepare for everything is preparing to fail.” Prepare for the most commonly tested material, working to get a high accuracy rate of around 80% on problems on that core material.
2) Understand the ideas behind the core material. If all you know how to do is to solve certain problem types, then you’ll be lost when the exam question is a variation of that type. But if you truly understand what is behind the method, you can adapt to such variations.
3) Practice solving problems.
a. When you’re first learning one of those core topics, practice on a bunch of problems. No need to hurry. You’re just trying to get the ideas and methods down.
b. Once you have a preliminary plan of attack and feel that you know those topics well, start practicing problems under time pressure just as on the exam. That is, tackle a random set of questions, not all on the same topic but chosen from the entire syllabus, allowing yourself a total amount of time equal to the number of questions in that set times the average amount of time per question on the exam [six minutes per problem on C/4; five minutes per problem on MLC multiple-choice questions and 2.5 minutes per point on MLC written-answer problems]. And practice “triage”---if the problem is not from among the topics on your personal plan of attack, skip it. That’s right, skip it---you have to spend your time where it will pay the most dividends, and that’s on the areas for which you are best prepared.
In case you’re interested, my MLC face-to-face exam-prep seminar for the April sitting is 11 - 15 March 2015 in Washington, DC . There’s still plenty of room.
Have you already passed at least a couple of CAS/SoA exams? If so, then my experience says that you have the ability to pass this exam. But not every one with the ability to pass it does in fact pass it. The key, of course, is thorough but effective preparation. As the great basketball coach John Wooden said, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”
But what kind of preparation? Here are my recommendations, based on all that experience I mentioned:
1) Design your own unique plan of attack on the exam that builds on your strengths. I like to twist the Wooden quote above and say, “For most people, trying to prepare for everything is preparing to fail.” Prepare for the most commonly tested material, working to get a high accuracy rate of around 80% on problems on that core material.
2) Understand the ideas behind the core material. If all you know how to do is to solve certain problem types, then you’ll be lost when the exam question is a variation of that type. But if you truly understand what is behind the method, you can adapt to such variations.
3) Practice solving problems.
a. When you’re first learning one of those core topics, practice on a bunch of problems. No need to hurry. You’re just trying to get the ideas and methods down.
b. Once you have a preliminary plan of attack and feel that you know those topics well, start practicing problems under time pressure just as on the exam. That is, tackle a random set of questions, not all on the same topic but chosen from the entire syllabus, allowing yourself a total amount of time equal to the number of questions in that set times the average amount of time per question on the exam [six minutes per problem on C/4; five minutes per problem on MLC multiple-choice questions and 2.5 minutes per point on MLC written-answer problems]. And practice “triage”---if the problem is not from among the topics on your personal plan of attack, skip it. That’s right, skip it---you have to spend your time where it will pay the most dividends, and that’s on the areas for which you are best prepared.
In case you’re interested, my MLC face-to-face exam-prep seminar for the April sitting is 11 - 15 March 2015 in Washington, DC . There’s still plenty of room.
Exam-preparation advice from Jim Daniel
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