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How much can I ask the facilitator

Z

ZimboActuary

Member
Hello everyone

I was working through some past papers and I'm wondering how much is someone allowed to ask the examiner/facilitator during the exam. There are instances where I feel completely stuck at some points and I wonder if I were in the exam, would the examiner be allowed to help me through the modelling process.


I welcome your comments.
 
I sat CA2 2 weeks ago (face-to-face, not online) and based on my experience and what they told us:

There are hint sheets available to aid with the model - you can get these and lose 1 independent working mark per sheet (this may not be fixed at 1 mark)

At any point you can ask the facilitator are you moving in the right direction with your model for no loss of marks. Technically there's no upper limit on this (apparently an individual in one sitting asked this over 20 times and still got full independent working marks).

Their answer will be either "yes that's okay" or a suggestion to reconsider some part (re-reading the question, over complication might be some examples). If you've gone wrong the answer at this point will be vague.

You can ask follow up questions to determine what's wrong and how to fix it and this will be at the expense of independent working marks. I'm not sure how detailed they will be but I think they will point out specific flaws with your model.

The best advice I believe is that once you're sitting the exam ask any question you need to. You can only lose up to 5 marks for this and it may help you to get the model out of the way so you can focus on the Audit Trail and summary where all the marks are. The worst thing they can do is not answer you in which case you're in the exact same position as before.

Holding off on asking questions is pointless as if you struggle away for a while on your model and then eventually ask questions you'll lose the time and the marks, and the time is much more valuable when allocated to the audit trail and summary!

At the end of the day even if your model is very wrong, you can still pass by documenting your wrong model and summarising your wrong results.
 
I re-sat CA2 (online) a few weeks ago, having done it face to face last year.
I don't think you can ask unlimited questions anymore, there was some statement to this effect on the exam instructions.

However I would say if you've done some of the sample papers, the hint sheets will probably be all you need.
 
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