The most difficult ST course of them all

[Dukerio]

Vote for your choice and comment on why you feel that ST course is difficult

I feel that possibly different courses may be difficult to different people, depending on your interests and your current work area

 

[YetAnotherStudent]

Hmmmmm I'd say ST6.

General was hard when I wrote it (as a 300 paper), not because the course material was hard, but because you never knew what the examiners wanted - eg when doing past papers you'd list certain things as the 'most important' and they'd list others, or your 'list' would be four detailed points and theirs 16 bullets, and the next time yours would be 16 bullets and theirs four detailed points!

ST6 has very 'buggy' notes which annoyed me no end, and not helped by having two books now all of which use different approaches and/or notation. Also the knowledge was skimmed over in places, and to the pure mathematician the heuristics would have given them a heart attack..... And the examiner and ActEd seemed to have vastly different ideas of what the syllabus was actually after. It seems to be settling down a bit now, to be fair.

 

[justarrived]

Hmmmmm I'd say ST6.

General was hard when I wrote it (as a 300 paper), not because the course material was hard, but because you never knew what the examiners wanted - eg when doing past papers you'd list certain things as the 'most important' and they'd list others, or your 'list' would be four detailed points and theirs 16 bullets, and the next time yours would be 16 bullets and theirs four detailed points!

ST6 has very 'buggy' notes which annoyed me no end, and not helped by having two books now all of which use different approaches and/or notation. Also the knowledge was skimmed over in places, and to the pure mathematician the heuristics would have given them a heart attack..... And the examiner and ActEd seemed to have vastly different ideas of what the syllabus was actually after. It seems to be settling down a bit now, to be fair.

I'd say ST3 - I passed on my fifth attempt!!!!

 

[YetAnotherStudent]

Wow, great determination

My first impression was that you are a member of the Faculty and you were 'forced' to do general, because I heard that the Faculty had such a rule for all student members about a decade ago

Really? News to me

I joined 200-and-something, and had no rules like that. Joined before the work experience requirement as well....

 

[examstudent]

the rules you are referring to were
between 1999 and 2003, you had to sit papers in all 4 specialisms:

301 (investment) 302(life) 303(general) and 304 (pensions),
so this is why you had to take general to qualify.

 

[ExamFatigued]

From personal experience ST6 was a real pig. Not necessarily because of the subject content (although very technical) but mostly due to a very poor set of ActEd notes (sorry ActEd - but true!) and subsequently introduction of a couple of text books. I.e. not a properly integrated set of notes like every other subject. Also most exam questions bore little resemblance to anything in the assignments/Q&A bank/mock exams/past CiD papers, so it was really hard to know what to expect in the first few sittings of this paper.

Also, to back my claim, an overall pass rate of 31.5% in ST6 since the new diet was introduced. This is the worst of all ST subjects, with ST3 having a comparatively healthy 38.8%.

Of course, it is hard to be objective, since we only get exposed to a couple of these courses, but you do wonder if some are 'easier' than others - ST1 has a pass rate of 48.3%, by far and away the highest rate of all ST subjects. Surely the candidates should be of a similar quality across all these subjects, with a fairly uniform pass rate?

 

[Pede]

Somebody (sad) once told me that they'd statistically analysed the historical pass rates of the ST exams and that ST3 wasn't significantly lower than the others. But of course pass rates don't necessarily reflect the difficulty of the exam or material (selection effect, etc).

Don't know about ST6 though, wasn't one of my chosen subjects. But I vaguely recall the notes being changed significantly recently to address the differences between the syllabus and the exam?

 

[YetAnotherStudent]

yes, changed significantly, by making you buy two textbooks!