CT8 April 2018 results

Exactly. And I think I would've been 1 of those 200 which is why this hurts Infact it would have been more than 200 as the long-term average was 53.8% prior to this sitting!

 

I suggest concerned students write to the Director of Education Clifford Friend and ask for a response within 14 days. I wouldn't waste my time complaining to education services inbox etc. this is a serious matter requiring accountability from the top.

 

They keep higher pass mark only when the papers are easier and students have well. But here it appears to be the reverse case. They gave a difficult paper, students performed badly and they kept a high pass mark. Seems unfair to me, TBH!

 

So it’s just the same out of date stuff being repackaged in different boxes and sold to unsuspecting customers

 

If you are one of the ~ 250 students who feel you would have passed had you sat the 2016/17 papers and therefore expected to pass this time around, it would be interesting to know how you scored?

 

It might be even more interesting to ask IFoA to disclose how their 'guinea pigs' performed on this particular paper and the chronology of the pass mark from the initial setting to the final pass mark. I see no good reason why this can't be disclosed.

 

The votes on whether 'it is unfair to keep the pass mark at 60%' are tending towards 70% in favour and 30% against - eerily similar to the %s of those who passed/failed this exam!? It looks as though some mental biases are at work here

However, in the unlikely event that any of the 5 people that voted against have either failed this exam or did not have the comparative luxury of sitting this in 2016/17, i'm genuinely interested to hear why you think this has been a fair outcome?

 

Hi, I did not vote, but I think the outcome was fair. In my opinion, comparing to previous exams - if you achieved a deep understanding, then this one was not harder, even easier. Once you realised what you were asked, the solutions required only simple calculations, and 3 hours were more than enough. After reading it carefully, I can say I agree with the examiners report.

Personally, I did not achieve this high level of understanding because I planned my time badly, and some of the chapters were hard and unclear to me (had no background on stochastic calculus, for example), so I skipped a whole question (5) and made some calculation errors. I think I was lucky this time to get 60, but I can only blame myself.

 

The IAI papers do not require the deep level understanding that the UK CT8 papers require. Consequently, those taking the IAI papers are not as disadvantaged. Moreover they have a 50% fixed pass mark.
Notwithstanding the fact that the UK examiners have some influence on the IAI exam paper setting and marking process,
How can that be fair??That is clearly direct or indirect discrimination on the grounds of race. Potentially instructing, causing, inducing and or aiding discrimination.
There could potentially be criminal liability attached to such transgressions.

 

Hi, DYH, thank you for your contribution. It's good that you got 60%, one minor typing error on your calculator would have resulted in failure! Personally, I found that I was scoring 15% higher on past papers so felt that this one was considerably more difficult, quite a few people on here seem to agree with me and this is also reflected in the pass rates. However, that is your opinion and of course your are entitled to that.

Out of interest, where did you read the examiners report? It doesn't seem to be published on the IFoA website so perhaps I am looking in the wrong place?

 

Hi Dom B,
There you go:
https://www.actuaries.org.uk/docume...cs-exam-paper-and-examiners-report-april-2018
The zip file contains the exam and the examiners report.

 

Thank you DYH, much appreciated! Having briefly read through this, these are my thoughts as to why candidates scored ~ 10-15% less than they would have scored on previous papers:

• Question 1, (iii) was the most awkward question on Utility Theory I had seen on any past paper. I think most students would agree. And of course if you struggled with this then you lost marks in the remaining 2 parts (10 marks lost)
• Question 2 was worded in a misleading way - it mentions 'Asset Pricing Models' so naturally most candidates, including myself were misdirected into thinking of 'Chapter 7 - Asset Pricing models'. However the answer the examiner was looking for here largely related to 'Chapter 10 - Stochastic Models of Security prices'. Had the question instead read 'Describe the disadvantages of statistical and economic models of security prices' then I expect that many candidates would have scored highly on this question. It was the ambiguity of the wording that threw most people here rather than lack of knowledge (5 marks lost)
• Question 5 - the examiner acknowledges that most candidates barely attempted question 5 (you and I both skipped this one too). In any of the past papers I was able to at least attempt even the most difficult questions. Whereas in this paper Q5 was near impossible meaning that 12 marks were immediately off the table (12 marks lost)

Losing these 27 marks, as most did, meant that candidates were left with having to score 60 out of 73 in order to pass. And of course, this is CT8 so many of those 73 marks are still going to be challenging and subject to calculation error under exam conditions.

In past papers I did, especially 2016/17, there were only ~ 10-15 marks that fitted into this very-difficult/ambiguously worded/nearly-impossible category meaning that you needed to score 60 out of 85-90 (instead of 73). This allow well-prepared students to make one or two calculation errors during the exam and still pass. However, when you need to score 60 out of 73, one or two calculation errors will result in failure.

In my opinion, this is why the pass rate in April 2018 was so low. Questions 1,2 & 5 significantly surpassed the difficulty of equivalent questions on most past papers (especially 2016/17) and resulted in candidates scoring 10-15% less than they otherwise would have done. This is why 31.6% of students passed this exam and ~ 60% passed the 2016/17 papers.

This means that the difference between scoring 60% and 50-something% came down to whether or not a student made a minor calculation error during the exam. I would be surprised if 60% of students scored over 50% in this exam (whereas ~ 60% of students scored over 60% in the 2016/17 exams).

 

... which I find wrong given that actuaries in the real world don't sit at their desks with a calculator from the approved IFoA list to do their work. Even when I did GCSE and A-level we were reassured that you'd get generous method marks. I think it's absurd to heavily punish someone for a minor calculation error. At least if you find it in a spreadsheet you just correct one cell and don't have to waste half hour of your exam time re-calculating your answer.

 

I could not agree more.

 

All

It is both encouraging and very telling to see that this thread is shaping up to be the most popular ever on the acted forums. There have been over 2,000 views in just under 1.5 weeks which suggests that a lot of people are very interested in what is being discussed here.

I have written a polite letter to both the Director of Education and Education Services, expressing my concerns about the fact that this enormous inconsistency in CT8 exam difficulty from one year to the next is not being reflected with an adjusted pass mark. I explained, with justification, why there are ~ 250 students who failed this exam yet would have passed any of the 2016/2017 papers and subsequently recommended that the pass mark is reviewed.

I have also highlighted that I already hold two Charterships and am a full member of three other well respected institutions with a Royal Charter. All of these institutions have a consistent standard that its members must achieve in order to attain a given qualification whereas the IFoA do not (despite similar numbers sitting the exams: CT8 April 2017 pass rate - 60.8% versus CT8 April 2018 pass rate - 31.6%, which shows that exams can quite literally be twice as difficult to pass from one year to the next)

I have personal experience in institutions reviewing and amending their decisions in the past and I have a lot of respect for them for doing so. No person or organisation makes a 100% perfect decision every single time and the willingness to review and amend those decisions is a sign of courage and strength.

Education Services have advised that they will respond to my letter next week.

 

Hi, by chance, do you have the ct8 pass rate statistics for the past 4-5 years? I mean, maybe april 17 sitting was the outstanding?

 

http://www.actuarial-lookup.co.uk/exams/14

 

It's so difficult to tell when you only have one statistic to look at... pass rate.

For example, say the pass rate is broken down between candidates sitting in UK and those sitting in India and it shows that the pass rate for the UK is 50% but pass rate from India is 15% then clearly the decision to move the pass mark is not a straightforward one.

Again, this is just an example, but if that was the case it would still need to be considered whether it was the wording of the questions that caught the Indian sitting out or if candidates were less well prepared. If it's the latter then it would be perfectly acceptable to not adjust the pass mark.

In summary, we don't have the additional statistics but they do. In situations like this you have to assume that the big picture looks a bit different from simple pass rate.

 

Hi Callum, I understand your point but being a UK student who prepared and sat this exam, I was scoring at least 15% higher in all the past papers under exam conditions than I did on this paper.

So the abnormally low 31.6% pass rate versus c. 60% in more recent exams correlates with this. This was just a significantly more difficult paper than almost all past papers.

 

I get your situation completely but my point is just more generally that we don't have all the information.

Here's another example. If moving the pass mark down to 55 would only have increased the pass rate to 35% is it worth it?

I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of that example, but just that it paints a different picture if you get extra info - which we don't.

 

We don't have all the information but a freakishly low pass rate together with experiences posted by actuarial students on this thread are good enough information to conclude that this paper was a lot harder than the norm.

I think that the pass mark should be lowered such that the pass rate is somewhere close to the long term average of 53% - just as was done for CT3 and CT5 this year.

The only alternative explanation for this abnormally low pass rate is that most of the 918 students were abnormally stupid/ill prepared - but as i scored 15% higher on past papers that had the same 60% pass mark i doubt this is the case.

All the evidence suggests that the April 2018 students were as good as any other students but they just got tripped up by an abnormally tough paper.