Passing the exams of the Society of Actuaries (the SoA) or the Casualty Actuarial Society (the CAS) is absolutely essential to a successful actuarial career; students that have passed one or more exams have much better employment opportunities and salaries for both permanent jobs and summer internships. As actuaries often joke: exams aren't important unless you want to get a job.
Both actuarial exam-giving professional organizations are dramatically revamping their exam systems starting with the exams in spring 2000—thus the "Y2K exam" terminology. Detailed official information on the exams and the transition rules (for translating credit for current exams into credit for Y2K exams) is available from the SoA in its Associateship and Fellowship Catalog and on its Website at http://www.soa.org/eande/redsgn.html and from the CAS on its Website at http://www.casact.org/students/examsys.htm. This document that you are reading is an unofficial guide for UT-Austin actuarial students to the most relevant aspects of the exams.
Exams 1, 2, 3, and 4 are jointly administered by the SoA and the CAS and count in both the SoA and CAS exam systems. Since these are the exams most likely to be relevant to UT-Austin actuarial students, they are the only ones discussed further here. The joint SoA/CAS Exams 1 through 4 will be given here on the UT campus each May and November; it is not yet known whether Exam 1 will also be given each February. Later exams that are specifically for the SoA or the CAS are also given each Spring and Fall in Austin. Detailed information on the exam system is available from the SoA and the CAS; phone 847/706-3500 or 703/276-3100 respectively.
Exam content is described briefly as follows.
An ideal Exam schedule for students that become interested in actuarial studies as freshmen follows; students that undertake actuarial studies later in their undergraduate careers may well have quite different schedules. The exams can be taken in any order, despite their numbering.
Some UT courses that cover material for these exams are as follows:
For UT-Austin students not already taking M469K by Fall 1998, the relevant exams in the current exam system are 100 (calculus and linear algebra as covered in M408C and M408D and either M311 or 340L), 110 (probability and statistics as covered in M362K and M378K), and 140 (interest theory as covered in Math's ACF309); more advanced students may talk with Professor Daniel for transition advice. All three of these exams will be given on the UT-Austin campus each May and November through 1999; in addtion, 100 and 110 will be given here in February 1999.
The relevant official transition rules are:
NOTE that passing the three current Exams 100, 110, and 140 provides transition credit for both Y2K Exams 1 and 2.
Advice concerning adapting to these transition rules follows (but students already taking M469K by fall 1998 should see Professor Daniel for transition advice):
The exams aren't easy. The exams are challenging. The exams are HARD! They are long, multiple choice, and usually every question is worth one point; only correct answers count in your score. Even very strong students find that they must practice, practice, practice on old exams in addition to learning the academic material in their regular classes. They have to learn to be accurate. They have to learn which problems to answer immediately, which to skip until later (if there is time), and on which ones to guess. A score of 65% correct is highly likely to pass, but it's not easy to get 65% correct. Plan to spend many hours taking complete old exams (one-and-a-half hours or three hours or four hours), scoring them, then studying what you missed if you intend to succeed.