The syllabus for the Modern Actuarial Statistics-I Exam is huge. That’s it. That’s the only vital point that you need to understand.
You won’t remember everything (…initially…)
You can just read the TL;DR and be fine, but I encourage you to read through to get the motivation for this approach.
TL;DR
Follow the F² (Fix yo’ Faults) approach
- Brush through all the concepts on the exam syllabus (buy Coaching Actuaries or TIA). DON’T MAKE NOTES now!
- After finishing the syllabus (with sufficient practice of exercise questions), start doing practice question papers in exam environment
- Evaluate your paper, look at the mistakes. Go back to those concepts and relearn them
- For concepts which you are unable to remember (as there are too many details, for instance the number of symbols in Life Contingencies) MAKE NOTES and keep revising them.
- You will also encounter some questions that are completely unconventional. Make a note of them too. You should know the logic and the process, so that if you are lucky enough to get a similar question on the exam, you won’t struggle.
- You may actually need to go back to a topic more than 4–5 times, but it will be worth it, once it sinks in (for instance in GLMs — the iterative process of finding the ML estimates)
Finally, just one month before the exam, do only question papers.
Also, maintain some sort of formula sheet, which allows you to remember those difficult formulae and concepts as soon as you look at them. I suggest you to read Why need a Formula sheet? in the bottom of this page.
What am I dealing with?
Frankly, most of the topics are easy to understand, but you will still see questions on the exams from easy topics, but you will be prone to doing silly errors, which is why practicing these types of questions till they become second nature is crucial. You should know exactly where most of the silly errors occur, not by reading someone’s guide — but by doing questions on your own!
The harder topics may discourage you a bit (I tell you from personal experience), but there is no need to worry.
Keep reminding yourself this:
Though the syllabus is big, it is not infinite. This means there is scope to learn EVERYTHING you need to know for the exam.
What I mean by this is, if you see an outlier concept (like an extra fact that you haven’t studied before) don’t start thinking “there may be many more like these and I might not be able to read all of them.”
That’s garbage and the sole reason why you’d think this way is because:
YOU DIDN’T PRACTICE ANY QUESTION PAPERS!
Importance of Solving Question Papers
At the end of the day, you are goin to be writing an exam. You are not going to be teaching these concepts to anyone. As my mentor always says and I quote
“There is no end to reading”
You will not get anywhere (atleast in this exam) if you just keep reading. Because you are bound to forget stuff. Hence, you will have to practice sample question papers, as people remember more from their mistakes.
Moreover, you should do them in exam enrivonment. Four hours means four. This will allow you to come up with your own time tactics that will help you during the exam.
But I know a thing that’s unfair here, I faced the same problem. The loop:
To do practice exams, I must know everything on the syllabus.
&
To be sure that I know everything on the syllabus, I must do practice exams.
So, what should we do? The solution:
(F²) Fixing your Faults approach
You have to first accept that when you are going through the syllabus material the first time, your only focus will be to learn the concept well and ensure that you can do any example that comes on the way. So that later, you don’t say: “I haven’t come across this in my life”
The investment that you do initially will ensure that you can understand the topic very very fast when you are revising them. So read them well and don’t worry about recall. This method takes care of it.
After you are done with the syllabus, just attempt a question paper. You might think this is foolish. But trust me, you will come out very depressed after the first paper as you don’t remember ANYTHING!
Now, you will have to sit patiently, look at all your unattempted or wrong questions and go through their topics again. After you are done. Redo the exam (you may look at the solutions while you are going through your mistakes, but not during the re-exam). Then re-evaluate yourself.
Move to the next paper. You will notice that you have started doing lesser number of mistakes than before. And the number of “lesser mistakes” keeps increasing as you move ahead.
This is the essence of the F² approach.
About making notes
If you are a succor for note-making I won’t disturb you. But in reality, you don’t need to make notes for “everything”. Rather, only make notes for topics that require you to memorize a lot. For instance, I made notes only for these:
- Policy adjustments, CTEs, Order Statistics
- Markov Chains and its applications
- Life Contingencies (different insurance types involved)
- ANOVA (one-way and two-way) [This one took me time to grasp but was rather simple once I got it]
- Hypothesis testing (the different tests involved)
- Linear Regression (to get comfortable with the matrix notations and the ML estimation process of GLMs)
Plus, I made them only after I started doing question papers, because I knew I needed them. What you need to make a note on may differ for you.
Why need a Formula Sheet?
As mentioned earlier, this exam is huge so even after taking the F² approach, chances are that you will forget. I wish I had this idea before, but nevertheless I will share it to your benefit.
Coaching Actuaries and TIA both provide an amazing formula sheet, so you can go with either of them. I used CA.
Do one revision of the entire syllabus, after you are comfortable writing practice exams. During this, you should sit with the formula sheet and map each concept with the text on the formula sheet.
I am basically asking you to create a dictionary in your mind, where each “word” is the text on the formula sheet, and its “definition” is committed to your memory.
This will ensure that you don’t forget that a topic (or in our analogy, a “word”) exists at all! Also, it saves time, as you don’t need to flip through pages of your material again and again.
At the end of the day, all you need is practice and a lot of momentum just before the exam.
ALL THE BEST! Let me hear if this was helpful.
