April Bookings

What an absolute pain, i have been trying to book the exam through IFOA website all morning.

Sitting in the office looking at my screen and keeps refreshing the website over and over.
This is my last exam and i have already missed the previous booking simply because it was somehow overbooked in the last session! An online exam!

It is like we are still in a period using a 56k modem.
Called the profession and they said there was a "bug" and it has now been fixed but i need to clear the cookies. How could this not be communicated to the students!?
They said they also could not help with exam booking, i need to definitely do this through the website. Nice responsibility.

After i have cleared the cookies, even restarting, still....stuck! keeps saying page unavailable and back to the main page.

How, just how the profession can screw this up so badly? Is it because they do not have enough funding to make it right?
Or simply because the people behind making the decision and implementing the new process are simply incompetent? Just how difficult to contract out to proper admin/tech firms to do a proper job? Acted will properly do a far better job.

I simply could not understand how such a large profession like us could still be stuck with tech and process like windows 95.
Correction, windows 95 could still work better than what we are stuck with.

How could we get the profession to be more accountable when the credibility and future of our profession are so dependent on IFOA where many staff are not even governed by the Actuaries' Code? I don't mind paying extra on my memberships, even from my own pocket, but more members and more money don't seem to be the way forward, something fundamentally is broken.

 

This evenings error has changed to:

• Cannot retrieve VAT information related to the specified Product and Rate
• Failed to make provisional exam booking.

 

The same error persists as of this morning.....

 

Now up and running.

 

The profession is not accountable to anyone. The FRC are useless and the IFoA is completely unregulated. You will struggle to make any form of complaint stick. I have a list as long as long as my arm. Most recently, it can been seen in the 2016/2017 Annual report that Mr Cribb has stated that current students would not be impacted by the upcoming changes to the exam system. This is simply not true and the IFoA has been backtracking and covering up statements such as these for the past 1.5 years. I also note they have prematurely stopped CT9 and students have wasted time and money on pursuing this.... ha ha, yes the IFoA staff don't even have to adhere to the Actuaries code... I suggested that perhaps they should be in the recent consultation on the topic, but I was ignored. Yes there is something fundamentally wrong. I would like to know how many complaints the IFoA receives on a daily basis. The worst is that I reported a case of cheating in an exam and because I have made complaints about unrelated items before (for which the IFoA have even apologised) the IFOA have just ignored my allegation of cheating and the student has just got away with it even though the examiner told the student off in the exam. We need to take action. Please contact me privately and I can fill you in on the latest...

 

Apparently the Putting things right process is meant to deal with service level issues. Students should escalate their complaints there if they receive unsatisfactory service & poor response to complaints.

However this process lacks credibility. Sections 3.1 & 3.3 gives them discretion to not accept & not address the complaint.

Then what do you do? You can go to FRC. They won't look into your complaint. They'll only look to see if the complaints process was carried out. Yes, the complaint process where they can veto it at will.

Therefore Infinity is right. There is no accountability whatsoever unless the IFoA choose to make themselves accountable. The phrase turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind.

Oh and just in case people think I'm having a go at 'actuaries' when I criticise IFoA, I'm not really. They seem run mainly by solicitors. Classic agency problem.