SHOCKING pass rates!

What's up with the pass rates in India?

I saw that 60 odd out of about 350 or so candidates had passed CT5 in May this year. At first I thought, maybe this was just a bad paper or something (because that's seriously low compared to the 50-60% that usually pass the UK papers). But then I checked the other subjects. Wait for this...

CT3:

"626 candidates appeared and none passed" None! Not one.

Um, woah. And this is CT3, no less. That's just weird.

Interested to know what's going on there..

 

That is rather poor no one passed. Is it the tuition? There must be an underlying reason for it

 

It's interesting to compare the papers:

http://www.actuariesindia.org/exampapers/May 2011/question_papers and Answers.htm

They are pretty aggressive. Memorising formulae will not get you through these.

 

It is interesting that many of CT5 questions in the paper are copied from the UK papers of subject 105 (earlier version of CT5).

 

The situation is actually to be viewed from a bigger picture.

1) There are millions of students here with 2-4 papers flooding the entry level job market. They have no intention in becoming a fellow and write the exam to get a job, and usually pass after 3-4 attempts per paper. Their progress ends there. IAI views this as counter-productive to the profession, since good students who are actually keen on progressing are hampered by lack of opportunities in the field, are forced into back-office actuarial operations, and eventually lose interest in the profession.

2) The exam fee here is ridiculously low (Rs.1200 per paper which is ~ 15pounds in UK terms). The annual subscription is Rs.500 (~ 6pounds) and the CT series material costs Rs.2500 (~ 30pounds). The low fees, while good overall, has prompted the "let's give it a shot" attitude, and you have unprepared candidates writing frontier gibberish in their exams, wasting time of qualified actuaries, who are low in number, and have better things to do really.

3) One of the loop holes which prospective candidates exploit is an entry requirement criterion which asks for at least 85% in 12th grade to be admitted. The school grading system here is again varied. There are the ISC and CBSE standards which are pretty good and are comparable to the international systems, and then you have the state boards, which are usually really really bad (barring one or two states maybe). A person securing 90% in the Tamil Nadu board for example, is equivalent to someone securing 60% in CBSE. The TN board exam used to pick 15 questions (worth a total 30marks) from some 150 multiple choice questions given in the prescribed mathematics text book, and even the order of the choices used to be the same! There was once a state wide uproar when a couple of out of the box questions were asked in a physics exam. Now compare the creativity and intuition required here to that required in the actuarial exams

IAI is now introducing an entrance exam to do away with all this, which should stabilize a LOT of things, including the pass rates, in the future windows.

P.S: Check out CT6 pass rate too

 

I'm almost entirely satisfied with this answer
When you put it like that, telling it like it is, it all kinda makes sense. Except that... wow... 0 out 600 odd people? CT3?! For which I'd hazard a guess that it's found to be, on average, the easiest UK CT exam (if pass rates are the thing to go by). And in light of the fact that there were at least 50 candidates who passed the substantially harder CT5 I'm still kinda baffled by this. Kinda. But thanks for that insight into this wonderfully bizarre situation.

 

Having been approached by people all over the world for tuition in actuarial science (due to a rather scatter gun advertising effort on well known social network sites), I have been appalled by the poor standard of Indian actuarial students. Oxymoron's post has certainly shed light on the reasons

 

Wow, it is interesting that the SOAI has designed its own papers that are a copy of the FIA...Would these exams be another good source of practice questions?

 

I believe the Indian papers are set by English actuaries as I know someone who use to post on here who sets the Indian ST5

 

ct3 may exam paper

Just looked at their may sitting of CT3, jeez looks like our ct3 on crack/overdrive!

No wonder no one passed, level of technical ability seemed to be aimed at an academic level, lecturer etc.