Does anyone feel there's value to be gained from the Practice Module? Do you agree with the Institute's decision not to publish Practice Module solutions? The whole structure of the exam strikes me as an invitation to make it an exercise in short-term memory! Rather than asking candidates to recall, say, specific scenarios in GN2 (as the P2 paper required for one question), would it not be better to test the application of the guidance? Yes, you need to be aware of the content of GNs, but isn't being able to apply it more important? Surely this is where students need to demonstrate competance, and not just in memorising them! Also, what do people think of the Institute's decision not to publish the solutions on the grounds that questions may be re-used? In that case, shouldn't they also decline to publish the questions? And it's never stopped them publishing answers to other multi-choice questions such as those in 107/108.
I agree I agree that the PM is bordering on the useless. Any self-respecting actuary would look up the guidance - particularly as it changes frequently - rather than relying on a memorised version. But I would have benefitted from the course helping me to apply the PCS, GNs, CoB etc to situations rather than just learning what's in them. And I'm baffled why the Institute won't publish results. Since they have in the past for multichoice questions there's a SRE (student's reasonable expectation) that they should for this too.
Don't get the point I also definitely fail to see the point of the PM. If the paper consisted of short questions it would at least test understanding & application of things rather than rote learning of lists for the multi-guess paper. (Although mini questions may make it harder to pass.) As a pensions actuary, do I need to know which life GNs are practice standard and which are recommended practice? If I did actually need to know, I'd probably look it up. My employer also thinks its a worthless paper.
should they publich the answers as someone who failed the practice module the first time round, i was really mad that they wouldnt publish answers. didn't the morris review say "the examination process does not have the full confidence of the student population". no suprise given we take an exam where we cant see the correct answers or have exam counselling. you don't even get to know if you failed on P3, P0 or both! most annoying is the institutes attitude. they were really late in posting a message saying the results weren't going to be published. no wonder students lack faith in the process.
I agree with all that has been said. The institute's attitude has been terrible. Why results letter weren't sent at the same time as all the other exams is beyond me. This must have been the easiest paper to mark and hence allocated passes or fails (not even graded ones). Having not received our letter for ages we contacted the institute and were told that they'd send them out at their earliest convenience?!?! Once again the institute showing what a truly professional organisation it can be. The not publishing of answers (or even questions it now seems) is strange. As has been pointed out, other multiple choice question papers and answers are published. The reason appears to be that they want to re-use the questions. In that case they shouldn't publish the majority of papers as most of these have repeated questions (of varying degree). Also, I don't know how knowing the answers from previous papers will help as you'd still have to have read the question and answer which is the same as reading the same information in the core reading. It's not as if you've learnt the answer to an application type question without understanding the concepts. Publishing the answers would only help us to study and practice ready for the exam rather than having to look up which GN is practice standard or not! On a more positive note, it was highly pleasing to have proper answer papers for the exam this time! The institute certainly made up for previous indiscretions by not making me have to write our numbers 1 to 50....
I have complained to the Faculty/Institute about publishing the answers to teh Practice Module. I was blandly told that their bank of questions was not large enough to allow them to publish solutions - otherwise everyone could memorise them easily! Its difficult to revised for the Practice Module without past paper solutions. in any event, the exam is simply a short-term memory exercise. Steve
Practice module answers Since the Institute didn't produce them, I went through the Apr2005 P0 and P2 questions with the notes/core reading and believe the answers below are correct. Does anyone have any comments on these or answers for the other practice areas? P0: 1B 2D 3C 4A 5A 6D 7C 8A 9D 10D 11C 12A 13B 14C 15A 16B 17D 18A 19C 20B 21D 22C 23B 24C 25D P2: 26C 27B 28C 29C 30B 31A 32A 33D 34D 35B 36A 37C 38B 39D 40D 41B 42B 43A 44B 45C 46B 47B 48D 49B 50A Although for these I'm not sure on 17 and 45 and may have made other mistakes.
My last post was partly to point out that if the Institute has a limited bank of questions surely the sensible thing is to not publish the questions, not the answers! Not publishing the answers just means candidates will waste some of their time looking up the answers to specific questions just to memorise them. Either that or share them amongst themselves less publicly. On another related point, I have heard a rumour that the marks for different questions in the practice module paper have been weighted dependent on the number of wrong answers received for them. I also believe the two halves of the paper may have different weights.
The word on the street is: 1. April 2005 results were published separately as the Institute systems had not been given enough time to get set up to include them in the automatic runs with everything else, hence it had to be done manually and thus a separate letter. It will all be in one this time. In a similar vein, the April Practice Module papers were manually marked while September's will be machine-marked. 2. As has been previously thought, neither the solutions nor the questions for the Practice Modules will be published in future.
