Current issues in actuarial education

Hi guys,

I have to do a presentation on "Current issues in actuarial education" on Friday. Any ideas on what I should include?

Thanks

 

Depends on who your audience is.

But possibilities are:

Pre qualification
existing provider(s)
subjects
courses
costs/support
timeframes
pass rates

Post qualification
cpd courses

Wider
educating the consumer

happy presenting!

 

It might be good to look at:

Exemptions and how these are granted;
whether universities should be used as an entrance route into the profession;
whether universities should use exams prepared by the institute to ensure students are not being taught purely to pass the exams;
whether specialising should be done earlier/ later than at present

Hopefully this will give you some ideas, and may even spark up a discussion at your presentation.

Good luck

Fraggle

 

Have focused on post qualification as most of the pre-qual issues have already been covered:

CPD:
1. Current CPD structure and proposed changes (these can be hard to find but I've heard that the scheme may require 50 hours CPD for Category 1&2 actuaries as opposed to the current 15 hours) - might be worth a comment or two

2. Is the scheme working (ie conscientious actuaries will remain up to date with current issues without needing to comply to the scheme minimum whereas the individuals the scheme aims to get up to date can comply with the minimum and not actually be up to date at all)

Industry issues (loads to list so have rather given sources of information):
3. Have a look at the last 6 month's worth of Actuary magazines as they tend to cover these quite frequently.

4. Also look on the Profession's website for the member interest groups - the areas they cover will be current issues or there would be no reason for a particular group to exist.
http://www.actuaries.org.uk/members/migs/topical_groups

Good luck!

 

Hiya,

Good luck with the talk.

I just thought I'd add my views.

I've been finding myself a bit disillusioned with the exams, after passing the CTs. I know I'm not the only one who sees the later exams as more of an endurance test than a learning experience.

I think the institute really needs to review the relevance of the exams. They are a lot of work for what is learned for them. In my opinion, they should focus on teaching students useful skills rather than just making the exams difficult for the sake of being difficult, as currently seems to be the case.

I certainly don't think it should be possible to get through most of the exams and not have more than a decent general knowledge of finance, which is the position I find myself in. I don't think I'm alone in this (I certainly hope not ).

 

I both agree and disagree with you.

The regurgitating of lists, etc for the later subjects is rather tedious, but I must say that personally, I have learnt stax from them. They've given me a broader understanding of the industry I work in and how it all fits together. Having those principles then gets me through wider scenarios at work, with being able to consider a broad range of issues.

The CT's give you the technical base, the rest the overall picture, I think.

As for the finance comment - I'm also not naturally inclined to just 'get the financial world'. This in my opinion could be better dealt with in the CT's, where we get the nitty gritty of financial economics, but the broader picture is missing. I don't know if the later 'finance subjects' solve that. In either case though, I think that there should be more of that even though one decides to go the life/health/general/pensions route. I recon there's some of it in CA1, but it's not re-iterated enough in the other subjects.

Just my 2c worth!

 

Thanks for the reply, ?????.

I often wonder whether I'm being too harsh with the actuarial profession about the exams. All-in-all, I still think the later exams are pretty hopeless though.

A lot of the material that I've seen on CA1 and ST5 seems like a lot of words and that producing these words will get you through the exam where an actual understadning of the material would not.

I've worked on models for Peak 1 and Peak 2 valuations, embedded values, ICAs etc. since I started work 2 and a hlaf years ago. The modelling chapters on CA1 added precisely nothing to my understanding of the subject and they would also have added nothing 3 years ago.

Just a few examples of the silly wordiness of the later courses:

- Both CA1 and ST5 seem to say little more about ALM other than you use a model that projects assets and liabilities.

- CA1 seemed to say that you don't need to run sensitivities when you're using a stochastic model. The simple fact is that we do run such senstivities on stochastic models - it makes sense to ask what would happen if interest rates were lower, or volatilities higher for example. I even asked an Acted Tutor about this, who initially said something along the lines of "that's not often done in practice".

I think what the notes were trying to say (not very clearly) that for deterministic models, we run sensitivities to get a feel for the uncertainty inherent in our results. For stochastic models, we still want to run such sensitivities to look at what would happen in extreme circumstances. The need to do this depends on the sophistication of the stochastic model and on the felxibility of how the results are output.

The fact is that many people will run sensitivites on stochastic models in practice and the notes simply brush over this. I feel that this will cause confusion to anyone with experience of modelling and in my case was one of the many drastic over-simplifications that caused me to lose interest in the course.

I sometimes feel as though the courses themselves are often best treated as word-association games totally separated from reality.

There's a post in the CA1 forum on systematic and specific risk which provides another demonstration of what happens when you try to think about how some of the concepts from the CA1 course apply in reality.

I've started looking at ST2 (Life insurance) now and that seems a lot better than either CA1 or ST5 - presumably because it's a subject that actuaries are traditionally educated in, and hence were able to write a better course on.

 

The exams, just like all exams in any scenario, are exams which are intended to test suitability for some purpose, but in practice usually test simply whether you can pass exams.

Whether the actuarial profession does a better job than other examiners at overlapping passing exams with suitability for work is another debate.

Acted is not really to blame, as it is doing its job - helping people pass exams!! It is however, is in the right place to EDUCATE students, ie going above the role of getting people to pass exams.

But I have found that examiners (in their comments) seem to be actively looking for lists in solutions. However, they do dress it up and claim to not do this. Eg "students do not have awareness of practical situation, the general financial world" etc. Sometimes I think they (and Acted tutors as well) are looking for standard lists modified slightly to say whether the item applies or not and why. Personally, I am of the view that writing a list of things that you say are not relevant to a situation is a bit pointless but apparently "good exam technique".

I also sometimes find that we are learning how to identify problems without really learning the solutions.

I concur with you Sam about the ALM. I personally was hoping to get an understanding of the subject from CA1/ST5 because I don't use this at work. I can't say that I know much more than the standard paragraphs to quote for exam solutions.

Re Sensitivity - do some GN's not require a report on sensitivity (eg para 3.4.8 of GN9)? Not that I know them inside out, but I thought that was the case. Perhaps, quoting plus/minus a Standard deviation on a stochastic model would suffice??? Otherwise, all actuaries by the standards do sensitivity testing in practice, regardless of deterministic/stochastic.

Funny enough the only exam I failed was the subject that I'm the most confident about (ST4). I don't see how I could have failed that given I passed CA1, ST5 etc.

While I consider myself competent to work in pensions in my country, I often wonder if I am alone in thinking that I missed something along the way in actuarial training. I'm not sure I could do all the things we as actuaries should be able to do especially ouside my "comfort zone". For those members who have gone into alternative areas, I wonder if their actuarial training played an important part in getting them where they are, or if it is just a coincidence that they are actuaries.

I'm about to start SA4 and wondering if it would be any better. Either way, I'm almost done and wouldn't mind the bar remaining high to keep the demand for my services equivalently high.