CA3 - scrap it

There is a debate brewing about CA3, with the IFoA Director of Education having to write an article about it in the TheActuary magazine's September edition.

I think CA3 should just be scrapped.

It is expensive and a joke of an assessment.

People with excellent communication skills have failed it.

People with poor communication and English language skills have passed it.

People who are bilingual or multilingual have failed it.

Some people's careers have been held back by not passing this silly exam and have been unfairly labelled as communication failures.

It is stupid having this form part of the actuarial qualification. It is a soft skill best dealt with by in-house training from HR. Let them waffle on about body language and buzz words and let actuaries be actuaries.

English proficiency can already be measured by GCSE grade.

CA3 is the only exam where the examiners know who you are. Without passing CA3 you cannot be a Fellow or Associate. Such an important gateway exam should be completely anonymous like all the rest of them.

Most of all, the secretive IFoA won't concede the low pass rates are by design - a feature of actuary exams for decades.

 

I completely agree.

CA3 is more of a workshop material rather than the actual exam.

 

Completely agree. It should be added to work-based skills (WBS), along with CA2 while they are it.

An ideal format would be having to submit a variety of communications over the period WBS were logged. However, I can see there would be confidentiality issues here. Would could work would be having your WBS supervisor having to verify that they have seen certain types of communications (verbal and non-verbal) and Excel spreadsheets. Comments could be provided alongside learning logs.

If the Institute want to cling onto fees (as CA2 and CA3 are no doubt nice little earners for them) they could introduce compulsary courses in Excel techniques and presentation techniques that must be sat before you submit your WBS. They could also up the £75 WBS processing fee.

 

Agree!

If they must they should turn it into a workshop with an exam at the end (similar to CT9). They should be working on improving communication in general rather than encouraging people to sit CA3 until they pass with no idea what they did better/differently to deserve the pass.

 

Completely agree.

The people I know that have failed this exam are usually the ones that were really good at explaining work to me, while those who pass the exam at the first attempt are terrible at explaining anything. I don't know what they are assessing in this exam, but its not any sort of communication that I'm familiar with.

The bit I don't get is how an actuary can fairly mark this exam. We are meant to be explaining things to laymen, yet an actuary is quite clearly not a layman. If it really was so easy do detach your own knowledge and expertise from the task, then candidates would never accidentally use technical language in a presentation and they would all pass the exam! Clearly this doesn't happen and many of us throw in the odd technical phrase in our CA3 exams. If candidates can't make this detachment, why should I believe that the examiner can?

Really it should be assessed by someone who knows nothing about finance not just an actuary who is pretending to be a novice.

 

If you look at the marking schedules published on the IFoA website, you'll see that there are two markers - one actuary (to make sure you've got it technically correct) and one non-actuary (for the 'other bits').

 

I think that neither ca2 nor ca3 should be scrapped. I passef Ca2 recently on first attempt and im due to write ca3 in Nov.

CA2 opened up my mind for the need to have proper documentation for models , especially if you want to become a developer of actuarial models.

Ive been studying CA3 intensively, since english is my 2nd language and i also see that its important for actuaries to be able to communicate ideas to lay people.

I know that its frustrating to fail these papers because they feel like non actuarial stuff, but the people who set the qualification process have the bigger picture in mind.

producing a breed of actuaries who are superb at communication will be to the betterment of our profession.

 

The actuary examiner is also judging the communication and not just whether it's technically correct. Only a small category differs between the two markers in terms of the weights of their assessment.

This means the actuary examiner must pretend to be a non-actuary in order to assess. That's stupid.

 

Excellent post.

 

It has been suggested that if you're one of the last few to present on an assessment day that this could work for or against you.

What if they've had many good candidates already? Do you really think you're going to be treated in the same way compared to if they had some really poor candidates that day?

It all goes back to the unanswered questions about how pass marks are determined and whether the Profession operate a quota system.

If you study the pass rates for CA3 for the different assessment days, you'll find they're never great, hardly ever more than 60% of candidates pass on a given day. I am suspicious of that.

They made people pay for an assessment preparation day yet the pass rates after that training was abysmal. Was this by design? Or was the training that bad. Or do people communicate that badly even after training.

It just doesn't add up. Although the fees and resit fees add up nicely for the IFoA. Kerching!

 

Well, the data is there. Go and show using a reasonable model (binomial, say) that the spread of results is not reasonable.

 

Sadly, the article in The Actuary did not mention anything about "scraping it". I got the feeling that the article promoted the great idea of CA3 and the fact that it is now run online.

 

I'm not surprised you want it scrapped based on the poor grammar in the nonsense you post on this forum. The term 'actuary' is not a proper noun so you only capitalise the start letter when it begins a sentence. An actuary does actuarial work and sits actuarial exams, not 'Actuary work', in the same way an accountant does accountancy exams.

If you put half the effort into bettering yourself instead of running down the profession you might find yourself doing slightly better in your work life.

 

I was referring to the Actuary Examiner, a specific person with a job title so I capitalised the A. If that's an error then I do apologise.

You won't shut me up.

 

Just compare the pass rate patterns for CA2 and CA3.

 

Could you at least perform a Z-test on them?

 

I wouldn't scrap CA3 altogether, it's very important for an actuary to be able to communicate properly and I think there needs to be something explicit in the exams which makes sure that you have reached a certain level before you can call yourself an actuary.

There is a case to be made for doing this through WBS, but generally WBS is a tick-box exercise for students, something they do as an afterthought when they pass all the exams. I don't think it's right that such an important skill be treated that way.

I would, however, agree that the current CA3 exam needs to be reworked. I know plenty of students who have failed CA3 multiple times and yet can communicate very well in the workplace, so it's clearly not giving the correct results as it stands. The big question is, how do you do that? It's always going to be difficult in such a subjective exam.

It's also very different doing things in a short period of time in a controlled exam condition than it is doing things in your daily life. A useful example is that I would consider myself a good driver, but I would almost certainly fail my driving test if I sat it tomorrow!

 

Go ahead.

 

When I went on my CA3 tutorial one of the students there kicked off about how he had failed and the exam was rubbish as he was really good at explaining and he couldn't understand why he didn't pass.

In the first exercise I had the pleasure of marking his assessment.

It was the most jargon filled work I had seen and totally unsuitable for the target audience of a layman.

I even remember receiving a letter from my pensions company and I was struggling to understand what they were on about even though I was studying the exams at the time.

The problem is that actuaries spend their life with actuaries and thus forget how to talk to the common man (eg trustees, policyholders, members, etc) and anything that seeks to address this is essential.

 

I had a similar experience on day 1 of the old CA3 exam.

An actuary from a well-known consultancy railing at how the exam was a waste of his time and how it would be a disgrace if he failed it.

He was a terrible communicator with a stinking attitude and guess what: he failed.

The reputation of actuaries in the legal profession is terrible. I know this because I go on holiday with a partner of a big City firm who was involved in setting up the original CA3 exam. I am also married to a solicitor who frequently has to deal with pensions actuaries.

I work in the London Market where we have to deal with non-actuaries all the time. I think there is a correlation between those who fail and those who are unable to communicate effectively to non-actuaries.

As bobba says, communicating to other actuaries is not exactly difficult.

 

Surely trustees shouldn't be financially illiterate? This is part of the problem- how much do you dumb down your communication? As the more you dumb it down the more vague it becomes.

Yes, there are actuaries with poor communication skills but I have not come across much of that.

CA3 is just a box ticking exercise for the Profession, which they've turned into a convenient cash cow and a way to block some from becoming fully qualified actuaries.