1 The exam

The main challenge of this exam is in communication: both understanding what they want you to do as well as telling the grader what it is that you did.

You will have 5 hours and 15 minutes to use RStudio and Excel to fill out a report in Word on a Prometric computer. The syllabus uses fancy language to describe the topics covered on the exam, making it sound more complicated than it should be. A good analogy is a job description that has many complex-sounding tasks when in reality, the day-to-day operations of the employees are far more straightforward.

A non-technical translation is as follows:

Writing in Microsoft Word (30-40%)

  • Write in professional language
  • Type more than 50 words-per-minute

Manipulating Data in R (15-25%)

  • Quickly clean data sets
  • Find data errors planted by the SOA
  • Perform queries (aggregations, summaries, transformations)

Machine learning and statistics (40-50%)

  • Interpret results within a business context
  • Change model parameters

Follow the pages of SOA for the latest updates

https://www.soa.org/education/exam-req/edu-exam-pa-detail/

The exam pass rates are about 50%.

http://www.actuarial-lookup.com/exams/pa

Since the December sitting, the SOA released two updates:

No more printed Project Statement: throw those hard copies into the trash can and get used to ALT + Tabbing. Test your knowledge under exam conditions using our 12 practice exams. You can see every keystroke and click on my screen. Is English not your native language? Writing templates save you time.

One Document Format: Preview the new format with example questions such as chapter 11.4 of this manual. The update says “While all tasks refer to the same business problem and dataset, each will be answered independently… and allows the tasks to be answered in any order.” Also, it says that additional information on the business problem may be included in specific tasks - where additional information is provided, including variations in the target variable, it applies only to that task and not to other tasks." To summarize, you can complete tasks in any order and there won’t be those little paragraphs that start with “Additional information for task X and beyond” but rather all of the information you need for a task will be provided within said task.