Sept 2008 paper

In general and vague terms (so as not to fall foul of the request not to divulge info about the exam for a few hours)... how was it for you folks?

It didn't feel like a massively hard paper... but i did think the first few questions were a bit odd/out of place wrt previous papers and the bigger questions weren't the usual suspects that you might expect.

Having two restless invigilators didn't help either - they must've paced the length of the Nile in the first 45 minutes of the exam!

 

I didn't like it at all, and I'm gutted. Spent far too long in a huge tangle on the bigger questions, and didn't get chance to go back to some of the earlier stuff.

 

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I guess there is a reason behind why the Institute sets such challenging exams:

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos041.htm

"Job opportunities should remain good for those who qualify, because the stringent qualifying examination system restricts the number of candidates."

 

I take your point StevieG4captain though I'm not complaining that the exams shouldn't be tricky. I'm just a bit disappointed in my own performance with this - I could have potentially qualified on it.

 

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I agree with you. I wasn't criticising, more of an interesting observation. It is disappointing when the exam doesn't particularly test our stronger skills, especially after months of working hard. Although, when we do eventually qualify just bear in mind those barriers to entry that are keeping the demand for our skills high.

 

Very lengthy and hard

Left questions worth about 25 marks

How did you ppl attempt the variance and expectation question where the age of person was 35

Were we supposed to integrate from 35 to infinity

Best,

 

I thought the paper was much more difficult than it was in April. The short questions at the start were strange, the pensions questions was annoying and nearly every question had a new twist i hadn't seen before so i was struggling for time by the end. The only redeeming feature of the paper was that an almost identical question to question 14 came up a couple of years ago so it was easy enough. My guess is that a lot of people struggled with this paper.

 

Not a nice paper - lots of tricks to spot. Did anyone even understand question 1? (to do with the lower quartile of complete lifetime) Never seen anything like it before.

 

Sept 2008 Sitting

Like most of the posts I can see here, the exam certainly didn't seem to follow the format of previous papers. I was a little disappointed there wasn't a pensions derivation or a Thiele's given there wasn't in the April paper either, and there wasn't even a big unit-linked question either, so just by looking at the big questions it was apparent the paper wasn't going to be a straight-forward one!

Having said that, I think it certainly could have been worse than it was. I made a bit of a hash of the last question which put me under a bit of pressure given I start with the last question and work backwards, but I got through the rest of paper (apart from question 1, ran out of time). A bit of guess work was needed on some of the questions, i'm hoping that even if I went off piste on a few of them, there should still be a few method marks awarded!

And Hi5, with regards to your question, I integrated from 0 to infinity using the standard integral formula for an assurance (after rearranging to get the variance of the annuity in standard form) - as the force of mortality was provided and was constant, this could be taken outside of the integral and becomes the numerator for the resulting fraction.....That's the way I did it anyway!

Good luck everybody!

 

I agree with the comments made by GladThey'reOver regarding the exam paper. However, I tend to start with the first question and work forwards and try not to go "off piste" too much.

 

responce to Hi5

question 10

Looking at it I would assume you would integrate it from 0 to infinity not 35 as 35 is the x in equation t is the time from now as it were