Judgment Day

Anybody know how far apart the exams are? If I just sat CA1 and it went badly I would like to have another go at it it the coming weeks ideally before I inevitably forget it all. So if they are close together rather than four exams distributed uniformly across the year, then there’s definitely another advantage there

 

Better than a political position is to be answerable to a board of fellow cronies with no share price to measure performance. It’s a cushy number. He won’t be going anywhere

 

I think there's only potentially a claim if we actively tried to join the IAI and sit exams and were blocked from doing so. In my ignorance I never knew any of those details of the IAI exams and because I never tried joining, I was never blocked and never discriminated against.

The ruling was specific to this case which was a British national. In the middle of playing snooker and lashing a few pints back with Ken Docherty last night, I got wondering how it works for third nationalities living in Britain (i.e. neither Indian or British). Any ideas?

 

The current executive are going to stand down if I have anything to do with it. It is not just this discrimination claim. There are a myriad of other complaints which have all been swept under the carpet.

No you don't have to have tried to join the IAI. Any British student could claim.

 

Excluding CEO and Chair of Management board there are 8 members. 2 of them are from IFoA Council, there having been elected by IFoA Council, who are actuaries. The other two are President and President-elect, elected by actuaries from IFoA Council (I think?). All four of them are actuaries & elected by actuaries directly or indirectly. These are people actuaries can get in touch with and make our views known. I'm not quite sure but the "Leader of Scottish board" could also be an actuary. Same goes for the Chair of Management board. I don't see why any of them should be 'cronies' necessarily. That's 4-6 votes from actuaries.

 

Dare I say, it sounds more like punishing the IFoA for your lack of exam progression!

They're tough exams and a lot of the time some of the material does not make much sense and can be frustrating! I've been there and I have the scars also. But anything valuable is only valuable because it's not easy to have it, and the qualification is the same. If it was easy to get it wouldn't be worth that much. You may feel snookered at the moment but with the later exams form just clicks and you rattle through a 147.

What you said about them heading out to Kenya for a holiday on our membership fees, I completely agree with. This does not advance our industry or our ability as actuaries.

 

Seek legal advice first! It's like saying I have been discriminated against because that snooker hall wouldn't let me rent a table because of my nationality. And the first question asked in the court is "so, when did you try to rent the snooker table?". And I respond with, I didn't! But they would have discriminated against me if I tried!....... not going to wash!

Don't suppose you recall the case brought against a bakery in Northern Ireland by a gay couple who claimed discrimination that the bakery wouldn't make them a cake on the grounds that it was homosexual in nature? Well if they are found to have discriminated (can't remember the outcome), that does not give a right for all gay people in the UK to also sue the bakery.

 

It shouldn't be more difficult due to discriminatory reasons. If there's an easier route to it then it's devalued. The Fellowship is being devalued by their various arrangements, such as handing out it out to Europeans via that MRA when Associateship was good enough. You can log into the AAE website and read the committee minutes and papers for yourself to see what's really been going on. You won't find these published on IFoA's website. IFoA has failed to disclose that material to Court twice. Also looking at their accounts they spend over a million quid 'participating' in these other bodies, selling Fellowship on the cheap. This is disgraceful.

 

They're not more difficult due to discriminatory reasons! They are easier for Indians due to discriminatory reasons! There's a difference! Everyone else except the Indians had to pass those exams the same way! Null's "entire life" has not been "ruined" because of a loophole allowing Indian students to sit the exam 4 times a year. Poor Null's entire life has been ruined because he kept failing the exams, and the route to preventing his entire life from being ruined was to either work harder and/or smarter to pass the exams or drop out and do something else like become a professional snooker player like me! There's plenty of drop outs from the professional exams who do not have their entire life ruined.

 

The snooker player didn't stay in character for long.

 

It doesn't pale into insignificance at all. Quite the opposite. It's big news. The illegal discrimination has been going on for 10+ years.

 

You keep saying this but the reality is very different, as another poster said - take the discrimination case against the bakery in Northern Ireland - UK court found that they discriminated against the gay couple as they refused to make the cake. This didn't mean that every gay person in the UK could sue the bakery did it?

Why is that so hard to understand?

 

Since snooker is something you understand. Think of it this way. If every Scotsman got a second shot every time he tried to pot a ball and you didn’t know about it how would you feel? You lose snooker game after snooker game and eventually all you can see are snooker balls. Instead of 15 reds they increase the triangle to include another of 6 reds that you also have to pot. You eventually don’t even feel like putting any balls and you just crawl under the table and die. That’s how I feel.

Every British person that has joined the IFOA should be offended and eligible to claim. The IFOA had an agreement to discriminate against British students so that certain individuals like Mr Cribb could profit from that discrimination. By being a member of the IFoA and British, you have and continue to be discriminated against.

There’s no point to try to lighten the mood. The IFoA have broken the law and they’re not going to get away with it.

 

I’m lost - the cake was homosexual?

 

Sure why stop at members that have joined the IFoA - there could be people out there that wanted to be an actuary but wanted to sit exams more than twice a year - and as this wasn't an option or so they thought - they decided not to be an actuary - we could be talking about tens of millions of people who could make a claim....

 

The bakery refused to bake a cake with a message supporting gay marriage, as request by gay person. Does this mean every gay person in the UK could have sued that bakery?

 

If you read the judgment to the end it says the Discrimination is “ongoing”. If any British person tries to join the IAI and they are refused entry or requested to travel to India to take an entrance exam, they have a claim against the IFoA.

the IFoA are very aware of the discrimination and they allow it to continue despite a court judgment criticizing their discriminatory conduct.

What sort of organisation does this? Why are the execs allowed to even continue in their roles?

 

What do you mean by this? I think you've said that myself and Ace123 seem "too well informed". I've asked before what you meant by that but you haven't respond.

Are you suggesting that all three of us are in some sort of conspiracy against you and Almost_there?!

 

It's amazing that we are well informed, but there is nothing wrong with him being equally well informed.

 

I would have loved to be able to essentially repeat exams more often. If the time between sitting is shorter, the information and knowledge you have made the effort to remember is relatively fresh. So instead of repeating an exam in the second half of a year, you can potentially pass it on an "extra" attempt (as though you passed it the first time of asking) and so your plans for the year are not disrupted. That means you get to take a different exam in the second half of a year (and have a back-up / extra attempt for that too!). I mean, is it not painfully obvious that this facilitates faster qualification?

(And for what it's worth, I'd actually looked into writing the Indian exams at one point, and sadly realised I wasn't allowed to. It does seem a bit unfair that others have routes with extra benefits. The IFOA should have addressed that somehow)

 

It's not painfully obvious to me Geraldine, no. Firstly, what are you saying to your employer? Give me some extra study days and exam leave so I can sit the exam a month later just incase I didn't pass it first time round? How demotivational would it be if you failed both the exams? What would happen if you, say, passed the first exam but then failed the other - would only the positive pass be recognised even if you failed to reach the required knowledge in the same sitting a month later? How would you feel if you ended up passing both exams - delighted? Or devastated that you spent an extra month studying unnecessarily?

Burn out - so you do your exam in April then take a break. Nothing beats leaving that exam hall knowing you're free from exams. I'd question how motivated you'd be to then sit the exam again in a month. Also, you then sit another exam in late May and then what, start studying late June again for the September and then October diets with hardly any time for a break. Sounds pretty horrific to me!

Even if you thought the first attempt hadn't gone well - can you really accurately judge performance in these exams? I've failed exams I thought I passed and passed exams I thought I'd failed. I'd also imagine that you'd have to register to sit the later exam before you sat the first one, so wouldn't know how that had gone.