IFoA Exam Changes - Student Survey

As some of you may be aware, the IFoA is currently carrying out an Education Strategy Review on the actuarial exams. Such reviews are carried out roughly every 10 years, with the previous review in 2005 bringing in major changes to the structure of the exams.

Major changes are again on the table from the IFoA, and as such a consultation process is underway where all stakeholders (including students) have an opportunity to provide their views on the proposals.

To easily collate the views of the student body, the following short survey is being sent round by the student forum reps:

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/RS6WKJS

The results of the survey will be provided to the IFoA and published in the Actuary magazine in the summer, so please fill in the survey if you have any opinions on the IFoA’s proposals (even if it is just to say “meh I don’t care!”).

The survey will close on 3 March.

If you want to read more, the slides provided to the student forum at a recent meeting are also attached, but please see the following additional points that the IFoA has asked us to pass on:

- Assessments for CS1, CS2, CM1, CM2 do not have to be passed at the same time and if you do sit both and fail one you only have to pass the one you fail.

- The proposed changes for work-based skills are likely to come in much sooner, but in the meantime, learning logs and essays logs will still need to be completed until personal and professional development is introduced.

- The changes are being driven by the objectives set by the IFoA’s Council, not by IAA requirements.

- With Council approval, the changes are expected to be implemented in 2019 rather than 2018.

 

I've sent numerous emails to the institute suggesting improvements, filled in a number of surveys. In all honesty the responses that I have had back to my emails are always along the lines of, "this is the process, take it or leave it."

Save your time and do some extra revision. Chances are what you say will not make a difference and the response you get from the institute will probably annoy you even more!

 

To be fair to the IFoA, outside of a consultation process on changes to the exams, they are unlikely to make any fundamental changes unless they really have to.

However, without wishing to be too dramatic, this is the first time in over 10 years that a consultation on the exam system has been ran and is probably the best chance for the views of the student body to be used to shape the exam system (and what skills an actuary of the future will need to master to qualify) until the next review in 2025/2030.

 

Ahead of the publication of the July issue of the Actuary magazine (which should see renewed activity on this thread), the results of the student consultation referred to in the article are attached.

 

if i've done my maths properly, that's only a 3% response rate! Would be interesting to know why so few responded. can't read the first few questions either - can you re-pdf? ta.

 

Fresh PDF attached - let me know if you're still having problems as I have the original PowerPoint version too provided by SurveyMonkey.

I've been very fair to the IFoA in not being open about this to date, but the honest answer is that the response rate was severely hampered by the IFoA refusing to publicise the existence of the consultation to students, and worse, hampering my attempts to publicise it as well.

I asked for the survey to be mentioned in the monthly student newsletter email, with perhaps a Tweet from the @ActuaryStudents Twitter account, and maybe even a mention on the website. I also asked for the contact details of my fellow SCF reps so that I could provide them with the link to the survey for distribution to the UK student body as agreed. All of these requests were refused.

The IFoA are the only people who hold the contact details for the student forum reps, so given the above I asked if they could instead pass on the link on my behalf to the other SCF reps. I was able to speak to a few reps over a month later and, sadly, none of them had heard about the survey.

When you bear in mind that the IFoA welcomed the idea of the SCF running a consultation on their behalf to gather student feedback that would report back in March 2016 while all bets were off, this was all very disappointing.

Fortunately, when I made the original post at the top of this thread, ActEd kindly sent out a tweet publicising it, which brought it to the attention of enough students to come up with some meaningful results. This was done without any request from me and was much appreciated.

As a consolation, the IFoA said that they would run an article in a future issue of The Actuary magazine on the strategy review to cover progress made since January 2016. This appeared in the June issue and didn’t include any information that wasn’t already given above.

According to the IFoA, they will run another student consultation later this year, but this would only be after Council have agreed the new draft curriculum and examination structure in June 2016. This will only leave the application of the IFoA’s agreed framework up for discussion, making this second consultation a much narrower consultation than the first. To be clear, this Council meeting has now happened so the framework (including draft curriculum and exam structure) is almost certainly now final.

I wanted as many students as possible to be able to give their views to the IFoA and be able to make a genuine contribution towards shaping the proposals before the IFoA finalised its framework in June 2016, so my experience above was very frustrating (particularly as it mirrored the experience of LastHurdles earlier in this thread), but I am glad that some students were able to have their feedback on the high level ideas behind the strategy review considered at a meaningful stage of the process.

I should also point out that the article in the July issue of The Actuary highlights just one of the areas where feedback from students has helped to drive a change in the IFoA’s proposal put before Council earlier this month.

No doubt the implementation of the framework will benefit from input from students, but it will be a very different consultation to the one ran earlier this year.

All of the above is based on the information I have received in correspondence with the IFoA at the time of writing.

 

pdf works fine now, thanks. Well done for persevering despite your frustration!

 

Thanks for sharing the survey - I wish I could have taken part in the first survey but I wasn't aware of it at all. Hope they communicate better with us in future. I suspect a lot of us have something to say about the way CA3 is examined. As you can see, this exam featured in the one question that had an overwhelming bias to one side of the scale (supporting change) - although, frustratingly you can't really tell if it's CA1 driving this bias or CA3. It's a pity the Institute doesn't make a more active effort to engage students and get as much feedback as possible from them (they could ask more questions, for one). I'd put good money on a general frustration with CA3 despite the institute's attempts to address these seemingly long-running issues

 

3% response rate - great job - perhaps using an official means of communication would have perhaps rewarded you with a more enlightening response.

This botched implementation of the new curriculum means that I am potentially going to have to take 6 exams rather than 3, repeat studying material which I have already passed exams on and with the latest PPD changes which have also been communicated in a piecemeal and incomplete manner, I will not even be able to qualify until 2020 at the earlier.

Was this the extent of the consultation for student members which was done at the time? Playing detective now, there seem to be a lot of lies being fed to transitioning students...

http://www.theactuary.com/news/2016/04/strategic-review-ensures-education-structure-fit-for-future/

"a transition plan will be developed so that learners studying for the current examinations are not disadvantaged"

 

oh my - it gets worse....

 

As the article I promised above has not been seen by anyone, the final version of the article that I submitted to the Actuary magazine on the early 2016 consultation survey is attached.

This article has not been published to date as far as I am aware, and given the time that has passed means it is unlikely to be appropriate to publish it in a future edition of the Actuary magazine. I am therefore publishing it here so that it is now available to any student concerned they haven't seen the article.

 

I think the FRC should be notified of this conduct.

 

Thanks Purple. I think things like assessing voice as essential for giving out a qualification are dodgy grounds nowadays given the likely disability discrimination challenges on that. While "voice", or making presentations with good voice and body language might be desirable for an actuary, it's quite another matter to say it's essential and objectively justify that to deny people an actuarial qualification. Can people with voice and movement impairments be conferred the qualification? It's a fair question to ask. It's also fair for me, as a non-disabled person to ask them, as I did many months ago, to justify their mark deductions for my voice and body movements in CA3 and what the standard is, given that deductions for these things contributed to a fail and lack of conferment of qualification. They never answered these questions. I don't think that's good enough.

 

This is what they gave me in Nov 2016 CA3 for the presentation question:
Marker 1: 57. (included 4/10 voice & 6/8 body language).
Without deductions = 57+6+2 = 65.
Marker 2: 52. (included 5/10 voice & 4/8 body language)
Without deductions = 52+5+4 = 61.
Average with deductions = 54.5
Average without these deductions = 63.
Pass mark was... 63.

My point is that these categories were significant in determining who can pass or fail CA3. Simultaneously the IFoA have refused to explain to me the reasons for these deductions or what the standard being applied is.