Study Method

Hi All,

I started studying for the CS2 exam and I'm feeling totally overwhelmed by all the information.
Any tips on how to approach this exam?

Thanks

 

I haven't passed it myself yet so welcome exam advice from the experts

But to help you cope with amount of study, suggest:
1) Remember its an 'open book' exam so no need to commit all the information to memory; rather need to understand it and master the techniques.
2) With any large task, it's best to split into bitesize manageable chunks. Simply focus on mastering each chapter in turn(first in the course notes and then R (through PBOR)) and see how long each one takes. Then after a few chapters, ensure you have allocated yourself enough time to complete all 21 chapters between now and mid-March, leaving a few weeks in April for dedicated past paper practice. The Acted Course notes also include a Study Guide at the beginning with helpful advice.
3)If you don't think you have enough allocated study time, suggest to speak now to your family/friends/employer to explore how to obtain additional study time between now and April.

Best of luck. (and again -i'm no expert but hopefully will start you off)

 

I think that's good advice from Bill. Lots of people find CS2 to be a tricky subject and the pass rate is low (around 35%).

To give yourself enough time to get to grips with things, you could study it over 2 exam sessions. If you're finding the reading hard going, I'd recommend getting the Online Classroom. If you watch the teaching units for each chapter before you look at the course notes, you should find the reading a bit easier. There are some sample videos on our website:

https://www.acted.co.uk/online_classroom.html

You might also find it helpful to attend a tutorial (online or face-to-face).

I cannot overstate the importance of trying questions for yourself. Watching us take you through the solutions isn't enough. From your post, I get the sense that you need some help to get to the stage where you can attempt questions. That's why I've suggested the above.

Hopefully you'll get a few more responses from students to let you know what helped them get through it.

 

Thank you for the help!

 

Hello All,

I am going through the same problem as the OP.

This is the first online exam I am taking. Before this, I would 'master' a chapter by taking elaborate notes and really spending lot of time on the study material. Now, I feel handwritten notes won't be too helpful as I need to be comfortable with answering questions in MS Word. I feel like I am spending too much time on the material, and it won't even be helpful as eventually I need to start practising questions in exam conditions.

The first week of Feb is already over and I have just about finished Part 1 of the course. I have taken the online classroom, but I feel the course notes have a lot more material than what is covered in OC. Covering both course notes and OC for each chapter seems to be taking too long, and I am worried I won't have enough time left for practise - especially because there is Part B as well.

I plan on spending minimal time on the study material to cover more 'breadth' rather than doing every chapter in detail, and then practising exam questions to see where I stand.

Any advice on this would help - do I need to change my study method? I will also try to put more hours of study - but I just feel I am not using my study time efficiently.

Thanks for reading this, and any guidance will be highly appreciated!

 

The OC was designed to mirror what we do in tutorials. It wasn't designed to cover everything in the Course Notes. Having said that, there are many more worked examples in the OC than we could cover in a 5-day tutorial and all the really important bits of theory are covered in the OC.

Now that the exams are online, there are more marks available for application of the theory and very few marks available for basic knowledge. So it's more important than ever to practise scenario-based questions. The Sept 2021 exam contained three questions that I recognised from previous exams. Students who had practised some of the older past exam questions would have had quite an advantage here. There are lots of older questions in the OC - we have not removed them as they are still valid and may be recycled by the examiners in future!

IMO, the best use of your time is questions, questions and then more questions. As a minimum, I would suggest all the relevant past exam questions from the last 10 years. Go back further than that if you can, especially on the topics of Markov chains and Markov jumps. The more questions you've seen before, the fewer surprises there should be in your exam.

 

I just want to double-check - is the April exam open book?
Tnx!

 

Which are the subjects prior to 2019 syllabus to be referred for CS2 sums? I mean if we have to solve past papers

 

The chapter "COPULAS" seems too tough to understand. Which mathematical concepts should we master before studying it?

 

Yes

 

CT4 and parts of CT6. There are also a couple of bits from ST9.

All the ActEd materials have been fully updated for the new syllabus. In particular, the revision booklets contain 10 years of relevant past exam questions.

 

Copulas are just a way of calculating joint probabilities. If we know P(X<=x) and P(Y<=y), a copula function tells us how to combine these to get the joint probability P(X<=x, Y<=y).

A lot of the questions on copulas just involve algebraic manipulation.