I sat CA3 in July and am currently awaiting the results. Here are my thoughts.
I very much benefited from the training prior to the exam. The tutorial was excellent, and the course notes are useful. At work, I now find myself applying a lot of the things I learnt. Formal training in communication for actuaries should, in my opinion, certainly form part of the qualification process.
However, should there be an exam? I agree with others in this thread who argue that a workshop or another form of training is sufficient. Regardless, if the examiners do stick with having an exam I feel that improvements can be made.
The exam I sat was a mixed package. Without going into any detail on the content, the written part felt like a good assessment of communication skills; nothing too technical, so it was a real test of structure, phrasing and getting across the key points. However, the presentation was a nightmare. An absurdly long, technical question, to the point that the 2 hours given to prepare the slide pack was a panic-stricken exercise in:
- Trying to understand what the hell the question wanted
- Transferring a lot of data from the pdf file to Excel, which had to be manually typed in
- Deciding on and creating suitable graphs (which in this case, given the volume of data we were supplied with, was not a trivial task)
- Attempting to apply the things I knew the examiners are looking for despite all of the above.
There was very little time to properly consider many of the core things that are being tested and that I had learnt from the tutorial and notes, e.g. structure, avoidance of jargon and aesthetics. My presentation ended up not being entirely complete due to the time pressure, and I had to mention this in my script the next day.
This highlighted the fundamental flaw in having a presentation exam; at work, I would have far longer to prepare it. With this presentation under synthetic conditions, overnight I could see all the mistakes I had made under exam stress. I then had to try to overcome them with what I was going to say. It really didn’t feel like a true test of communication.
A final point on the communication of the examiners. I am sitting SA3 in October, and have just looked at April's exam as part of my revision. One of the questions was:
"Mr Rich subsequently decides to underwrite in the London market. Based on its business plan, the regulatory minimum capital requirements have been estimated at £100 million at the end of the first year of operations.
Describe the factors that should be considered when deciding on the initial capital of RIL."
The examiner’s report had the following to say:
“Many candidates misinterpreted the question and discussed how capital requirements would be calculated in an ICA / ECA type method. The question was instead about how to decide what capital to actually hold relative to a regulatory minimum. Many candidates wrote significant volumes with some apparent understanding of capital issues yet scored very low marks, potentially failing on this issue.”
These type of comments occur very frequently in the later exams. Indeed, I misinterpreted this question and I wasn't under exam stress. Surely the examiners must realise that if the majority of students misinterpret their question, then the question has been phrased poorly? This is a classic example of poor communication.
Their arrogance on this issue really grates with me and is entirely inconsistent with what they try to teach in CA3.
Last edited by a moderator: Sep 12, 2015
