Hi, What is the recommended amount of hours you should spend going over the course notes and the projects for this subject?
From the profession's website: http://www.actuaries.org.uk/students/exam_subjects/CA2_Module/modelling_faqs How much study time is needed? It is unlikely that the student will need a lot of study time for this. Our suggestion at present is 20 hours plus the experience likely to be gained through work-based skills
It depends on the person and where their strengths lie, but I think a lot of people underestimate the study time required for this and that is why the pass rates are so low. I needed at least double the recommended 20 hours to feel i'd done enough practice - and there was more I could have done. I only read the notes through once, most of my time was spent doing practice assignments, practising writing spreadsheets, an audit trail and report. You also get pre-course material to prepare, which took me several hours.
I think the work experience is the bit most people underestimate. I think you should have experience with spreadsheets, preferably with a wide range of purposes and styles and you should have built at least one up from scratch yourself. You also need to have experience with documenting work, and explaining tasks to both actuaries and new students. Once you have this, it should be OK but you still need to adapt the skills above to suit the requirements of the exam (where practice of sample exams comes in). As far as practice goes, I would only bother with the samples marked as past exams since the others are not up to standard, and it could take someone 15 hours or 50 hours, depending on the person.
I'd agree with Ricegirl's comments about the study time required for this exam. I passed CA2 recently and found that I spent about double the recommended study time. I went through the ActEd notes, did the ActEd assignment (and got it marked) as well as all the practice examples on the website and the pre-course assignment. A lot of people seem to still treat this exam as a 'turn and pass' type paper - it certaintly isn't! I think it's worth putting in the hours to avoid having to retake it. For me, there was added incentive to pass it as it was the last exam I needed to qualify.
