Results April 2019

Hello - I am very sorry to hear about your disappointing result. It sounds like you worked very hard for this exam, but on the positive side (or at least, less negative) you were only a few marks short of where you needed to be.

It would be helpful to hear from other students' experiences, but FWIW a few thoughts from me:

• Have you had feedback from other people who have marked exam papers or assignments for you? Did you get the X assignments marked? Yes, doing the Mock exam with marking sounds like a good idea as well. I would strongly encourage you to get other people to mark exam question attempts and give you feedback as, based on what you have written, there may be issues relating to the way in which you are answering questions that you are not aware of. For past papers, consider swapping your answers with those of another student at work and marking each others' with feedback (eg is the writing style too waffly, is there too much repetition or drilling down into the same basic idea, do the points lack clarity and precision? etc). This will also give you the opportunity to pick up good practices from others.
• It is of course important to have thorough understanding of the technical content of the course, but developing good exam technique (particularly question reading skills, idea generation techniques and a succinct, efficient writing style) is equally vital. Aim to keep on top of the former but perhaps work more now on improving the latter?
• You say that you 'knew your notes' - make sure that you are gaining depth of understanding rather than just learning, and that you are doing so in relation to the detail of the Core Reading (which is what the examiners will be testing) rather than summarised notes.
• Question practice is, of course, massively important as part of your exam skills development. Bear in mind that the Revision Notes will generally contain only summarised answers. Use the Examiners' Reports and ASET to get a feel for the amount of detail that is needed in answers. ASET is also a very useful tool for helping you to develop exam techniques and question-answering skills, as it provides suggestions and hints as to how to tackle the questions, not just what the answers are. (Bear in mind that the existing ASET covers the papers from 2014 to 2017; a mini-ASET for April 2019 will be available in due course.)
• As a tutor, I would of course also highly recommend attending tutorials! I appreciate that this may not be an option, depending on your location, but bear in mind that we do offer live online tutorials.

I hope that there is something there to help encourage you forwards with your studies. Hopefully other (ideally successful!) students can endorse some of these ideas and will have some other suggestions.

All the very best for the next sitting.

Lindsay

 

Thanks for the clarification. Your notes sound great!

Given your situation, I would definitely encourage you to take up marking of assignments/mocks.

Also perhaps see whether there is a qualified actuary at your company who would be happy to review one or two papers for you and provide some feedback on your exam writing techniques?

All the best & keep up the good work.

 

Hey - I am very pleased for you & glad that you found the feedback from the marker and looking at ASET so useful. All the very best for your next exams: keep up the great work!