last time I prepared for ST6 and wrote the paper. I studied core reading and x&Y assignments and I was able to attempt only 40% of questions.I didn't touch Hull and Baxter and Rennie books. Please advice me is it compulsory or necessary to read and thorough those two books or the two books is meant for the clear understanding of the subject? And also tell me if I can understand the core reading and assignments without reading the referred books---is it enough to appear for the exam?
I definitely benefit from reading Hull. Areas like LMM, finite difference method, trinomial trees for interest rates are explained a LOT better in it.
The notes aren't enough. You need to study the textbooks. The notes are sometimes useful to understand Hull. The maths in Hull is very abbreviated, but you actually do need to understand it properly for the exam. It's very easy to go through Hull thinking it's easy because it's so abbreviated- it isn't. Make no mistake, the volume of material required for this exam is much greater than most STs. That said, there is a temptation to concentrate on the maths to the detriment of the easier wordy bookwork. A lot of exam marks can be ibtained through the wordy questions. I also think that the pass mark for this exam is likely to be very low. I passed recently and know I got a pathetically low mark!
I agree - it's important to use the textbooks. The ActEd Notes aren't designed to avoid the need to look at the textbooks - they're there to complement them, to guide you through them in a sensible order, to highlight key areas to focus on and to expand on areas where we think the exam might require additional knowledge. We've taken the view that there's no point in simply repeating the same detail as in the textbooks where they do an excellent job all by themselves. So by not looking at the textbooks, you'll be missing out. However, the textbooks weren't written with actuarial students preparing for the ST6 exam in mind, so the focus isn't always totally aligned with what's required. In such cases, we deal with this in our Notes. So, it's probably not a good idea to just read the textbooks either. Both the testbooks and our Notes are needed to ensure a full understanding. Having said that, I should probably admit that I'm aware of people that have passed ST6 using just the textbooks and others that have passed using just our Notes. I regard these strategies as being high risk though!
