CT4(103) April 06

Have started a separate thread for this one though realise that it may cross over with CT4.

What's the general feeling? Slightly easier than September I thought (which in turn was a big improvement on last April) for those of us on our third (and hopefully final) attempt.

Thought what I did was fine - all except that 9 marks of last question. So that's down to 82% and also realised after the exam that my long run probabiliy was wrong in Q5 - silly error - I said H-L=0, therefore H=L=0 and therefore M=1. Am hoping for around 70% though.

Would be great if they took the mark I got in 104 into account when I passed it, like they effectively do now for those doing the whole paper.

I have to laugh when they separate the room into those doing the 104 half and those doing the 103 half, and about three quarters are doing the 103 half. Is this the same in other venues?

It annoyed me that the rule about stopping writing when told to do so was blatently ignored by at least 2 people where I sat the exam. Those extra 2 marks in those extra 2 or 3 minutes could be the difference between a pass and a fail.

 

CT4 paper was fair

I agree, the paper was much more doable this time than the previous 2 papers. Thankfully there were no ambiguous questions. I did however feel extremely time pressured and an extra 10 minutes would've helped me get 7 or 8 extra marks. I think it is good I can say this because in the September paper (which I failed) I was trying to suss out the questions for half of the allocated hour and a half so did not feel i was being tested! Today was a completely different story. I actually think the institute is finally cottoning on to the fact that:
a) If students end up losing a partial exemption they will be extremely disgruntled when the time comes and rightly so. I remember spending days trying to get my head around exposed to risk and the thought of having to do it again scares me!
b) If they want to promote the Industry they need to start setting papers that appear more linked to the real world and less linked to what some academic want's us to know about but is of no relevance outside of the exam. The need for this is critical in order for actuaries to be of any use to companies in the real world.

 

What a nuisance!

I take back my comments about the exam paper being fair because the results came out last thursday and, once again I have failed. This is despite me knowing the course inside out. I really am at the end of my tether with this paper now. I reckon they had a very high pass mark to make sure no more than the 50% that passed would pass and "to maintain standards". What they failed to remember is that by now there must be a good proportion of people who resat the paperand therefore generally "standards" were high but because of the institutes attitude to keeping pass rates low this fact was ignored. I now only have September to get this paper before my step back to redoing 104. I feel so hard done especially when this silly course is now embedded in my long term memory and i know the material more thoroughly than i know the material for all the other 100 series exams i have passed.

 

You're no the only one, WhoWantsToBeAnIFA. This is the third time I have failed this partial paper. Last time, after getting an FA, I went for exam counselling, and I was shown that I must have been very close because my paper was triple marked, which I presume means within about 1-2% of the pass mark, and that was with only 35% of people passing, ie my paper must have been in the top 35-40%. And before that, there was that "rogue" April 05 paper.

I'm considering my options at the minute, ie whether to go for counselling again or possibly appeal, though I supect the latter route is pointless.

Has anyone any idea what the pass mark was for CT4(103)? I reckon it must have been 70% or more.

This idea of doing combining half subjects has proven unfair, I think. I'm sure elsewhere on this forum that people have been told that people have passed the whole of CA1 having failed one of the papers with an FB (having sat them together as a whole CA1), yet if they were only sitting the paper they failed due to a partial exemption in the other subject, they would have obviously have failed

I'm sure this "cross-subsidisation" of marks must also occur for those sitting CT4. When I passed 104 originally, only 34% passed that sitting, and I know I did a good paper, yet the amount by which I exceded the passmark then is not taken into account now. I therefore believe that the proportion passing the whole of CT4 is probably higher than the proportion passing CT4(103). However, it ought to be the other way round since with every repeat sitting of CT4(103) must mean that knowledge of the subject is increasing and more part of the subconcious. With over 900 students sitting this time, (and an undisclosed number of these sitting CT4(103)) there are going to be quite a number unfairly going to be repeating the whole of CT4. And I'll bet you we'll get it the first time sitting the whole of CT4 and displace most of those sitting it for the first time.

I will sit this paper until I get it, but I neither believe it will make me a better, more rounded actuary, or feel any clever.

I also wish I'd used those couple of extra minutes at the end of the exam that the people I mentioned at the top of this thread also used.

 

I admire your persistence Sauny Bean but have to say that the Institute has failed to pay any attention to us, their customers and they need to be told this. There were moments on Thursday evening when I considered giving up these exams. Why, because this is the first time when I have sat and waiting anticipating a pass and then failed - i have never felt so robbed and that i'm truly wasting my time. There has never been a time when i've sat an exam, felt it went well and then failed it. This is worse than sitting an exam, having performed abysmally. At least you can take immediate steps to better your knowledge of the subject and most of the time you would pass the next time. What can we do with 103 - keep failing it until our numbers finally come up. As for the counselling - did you truly think it was value for money. What did they say you could have done better and why do you think you failed this time?

 

Turns out I FB'd it this time, so I obviously did something more wrong than I thought! I look forward to finding out exactly what in the counselling session ahead of the next exams.

Despite having done exam this 3 times already, I'm not at all disheartened - I passed CT8 this time and am waiting on CA1. As CT4 was a mere 2 days after CA1, I could have done with a bit more preparation time on sickness duration, despite feeling I had otherwise written a good exam. One thing I did do, which may turn out to be where I fell down, was to use the stochastic modelling notes that were in CA1 as part of my revision because I thought they were better than those in the CT4 notes, and they were fresh in my mind.

Whether counselling is good value for money is debatable - it's just feedback on an exam like you might have got at school, except you wouldn't have had to pay for it then and you could take the paper away. However, you do come away feeling as though you've got a better than average chance of passing next time. (I've done it twice already and passed the relevant exam immediately afterwards - this time was an exception.) And if your lifetime goal is to become an actuary, you shouldn't let £180 stop you, especially as you probably won't have to pay for it. (If you tell work that you're going to it, whether they pay for it or not, they'll probably reimburse you anyway because they'll admire you're determination to back yourself.)

And I have to say that at least the exam setters seem to have stopped setting ambiguously worded questions in the last 2 sessions in CT4 and CT8 (or maybe I just got well-practiced at dealing with them!).