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Common challenges in answering exam questions:
1. How to remember such a vast and verbose syllabus
2. How to connect these points with question papers
3. How to generate enough points, more importantly, how to generate relevant points in relation to the exam question, because the suggested answers invariably come as a surprise.
4. How to manage time during the exam, there is so much think and write
Specialist subjects are different than core subjects. They make you… Specialists!
Expansive perspective- 30K feet view
Senior Management perspective – 15K feet view
Working perspective – ground level
How to make exam day like any other day
Effective revision – it is more about knowing thyself!
We write (too frequently) what we know, rather than what is asked for
How to move a mountain? One trailer-full at a time!
Know how others think what you think!
Maximize the reading time at the beginning of the exam
Last Saturday, I completed a guidance and support program for those attempting SP2 – Life Insurance from the Institute of Actuaries of India (IAI). The objective was to make overall improvements in exam preparation, strategies, and looking out for common mistakes.
It had been some time since I had set question papers and marked answer scripts for IAI, the same with the teaching at Christ University Bangalore. As my teams grew, I couldn’t do justice to these significant commitments. They quickly gobble up many weekends. I have high regard for those who actively volunteer to accommodate such high-quality time for supporting the Institute in exam work.
So got my fresh copy of the core reading. The content of the study material has changed little since I had been setting question papers. But the format and style feel fresh, easy on the eyes, and fluid. The support program was four blocks of 2 hours each. Since this was supposed to be interactive, I began enquiring about two things that hold students back and which one, if addressed, will be of most help.
Common challenges in answering exam questions:
It was interesting to see common threads. The challenges students felt were:
1. How to remember such a vast and verbose syllabus
2. How to select from this large info volume, to connect with question papers
3. How to generate enough points, more importantly, how to generate relevant points concerning the exam questions, because the suggested answers invariably come as a surprise.
4. How to manage time during the exam, there is so much to think and write
Over the sessions, we could speak about how to address these issues. I have tried to explain in detail here, hoping that these will be helpful tips to pass actuarial exams for students attempting SP papers from IAI or IFoA.
Specialist subjects are different than core subjects. They make you… Specialists!
After evaluating hundreds of answer scripts and coaching many in my team, I sincerely believe that one needs to have an expansive mindset to learn the SP subjects. The objective is not just a pass grade in the exam, but it is really about how you learn a professional skill that will be your identity. In some way, it is like developing a golf swing. Deliberate practice done zillions of times with mindfulness; the shot becomes you. Exam pass is only the beginning, but the skillset will be an actuary’s core, something you want to be part of you.
If you are picking up a Specialist paper after completing Core principles/practices subjects, a perspective on how these two are different is a must. Core subjects are like building blocks/tools. More of mathematical or statistical constructs. You can learn them reasonably independently, and you will be tested on how you apply them in the exam. The Specialist subjects are more theoretical. One starts to learn the fundamental professional concepts of the subject, like life insurance. Chapters can’t be fully understood in isolation; a good back and forth consultation throughout the subject is a must as you learn through. Focusing on certain parts and glossing over some others might get you through core subjects and even in specialist papers if you are one of those lucky ones, but it would leave you poorer at the overall comprehension of the specialist field knowledge.
Expansive perspective- 30K feet view
The best way to study for actuarial exams is to develop a holistic approach, which I prefer to describe as deliberately practicing three perspectives.
The first one is 30,000 feet view. How best you know the outline of the specialist subject you are learning? Start reading the syllabus, and just the syllabus at the beginning of the core material pack. Read through each section, familiarize the blocks and the layout of chapters. For example, note the syllabus section (for current SP2 subject) 3.5 of SP2 has chapters 7, 15, 27, and 29 as relevant. Ask why? What is the common thread between these chapters and the syllabus objectives? It’s okay if you can’t figure, we will surely find the answer later, but it helps a lot to know what we are going to learn.
In the long run, this 30K feet view is what you will need to solve a real-life professional challenge, but more importantly, now required to generate a good number of points for a tricky exam question. Another birds-eye-view perspective is to understand how you will be tested, 25% for knowledge, 50% for application, and 25% for higher-order skills; what do those terms mean? Most of the higher-order skills will need linking multiple parts of the syllabus.
Spend at least a week going through the syllabus every day. If you are working in the specialist areas in your day job, it will be quite satisfying. Think through what you know already and how much you can relate to and ask why and how from your CT level understanding. Try to look ahead to which areas you might enjoy, get curious to learn, and look forward to knowing more. Build up good anticipation!
Senior Management perspective – 15K feet view
Once you are familiar with the syllabus, spend two to three weeks getting closer to the subject. Aim towards having good overall details but not the closest/exact/hi-def details. More like a 15,000 feet view that a Senior middle-level manager will need. Closer to the ground but still sufficiently high to keep a holistic perspective. An excellent way to get about this is to stitch together the objectives at the beginning and the summary at the end of each chapter in one place. Don’t bother to read through the core reading yet; that can wait. Spend about 2 to 3 weeks. Think of this as adding background colors to the pencil outline drawn at 30K view.
Strengthen your understanding of the high-level syllabus with these objectives and summaries. You will start relating more to the subject. You might also start thinking about which tools/constructs you learned in core subjects will be helpful to arrive at these summary statements. Enquire how much you already know of these summaries, which concept feels natural. Many would feel like common sense. Scribble notes, highlight, add question marks, a deeper level of personalization of this summary will serve as good memory aid at the next stage.
Working perspective – ground level
Lastly, the ground-level preparedness. Now your grunt work starts, of building a lifelong competency. Each chapter articulates a concept, typically might have 10 to 12 most important points. Already you know what to expect and where this core reading fits into the large picture. Follow active study tips at the beginning of the core reading material pack (now, honestly, did you pay attention to them before?).
Look at each para and synthesize it into short, concise sentences as hooks to those paras. Then make a mind map, make it as personal as possible, colors, designs, scribbles, coffee-stain, anything that make it yours. To the extent that if someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and mentions a chapter name, you recite the mind-map hooks without thinking.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not rote learning, rather more like that golf-swing becoming you. Muscle memory. You will have your core blocks and overall perspective so strongly baked in. You will be able to dish out a straw-man solution quite effortlessly, either in real-life challenges or in those 15 minutes of reading time at the beginning of the exam. You will quickly decide what can be a good draft solution, the first few things you will need to resolve, the show-stoppers, or where you will need help.
This might take at least 8 to 12 weeks, but it is not the study hours that matter but the effective mindful internalizing of the core concepts. Everyone will have their own pace and style; this is not a race! Ideally, you should have completed self-assessment questions in the core reading as you encounter them and have attempted assignments series by this stage.
What about the past question papers? Don’t get there at this stage. More about them below.
How to make exam day like any other day
Two things that will help you on exam day. First, get used to exam attempting or writing/typing like a routine. Second, get enough rest. Good sleep, motivating movies, or a long walk with your dog. But definitely not a round of intoxication with your pals!
During the pre-pandemic written exams, trust me, legible writing was a sure way to get those discretionary marks and make an excellent overall impression. That required practice of writing and lots of patience. Don’t cramp your answers; clearly write question numbers and parts on the page, start a question on a new page, underline keywords.
I haven’t written online exams, but I guess common sense prevails there too. And being able to type fast enough. So your revision should include a lot of practice to be presentable to the examiner.
Effective revision – it is more about knowing thyself!
What do you revise? Revise where you need to gain depth or perfect the area you already know good? Common sense says depth, right? Our minds cheat us big time. It is so easy and very satisfying to pick up the study material, dig straight into core reading with scant regard to syllabus objectives or summary, ignore practice questions, underline appealing lines, and jump to the next chapter. We all have been there. The Sooner we run through like this through the whole course, the better; we have done an excellent job. And then try to do this again in half the time. Or through all the chapters in the night-out before exam day. Feel good at the number of underlines that we recollect.
Why do we do this? Our mental reward systems. Same patterns with which your subconscious mind drives your habits, good or (mostly the ones you wish you could change) bad. We like to believe that we know all; hence read what we know better already and feel good about it. Ignore what we don’t know and minimize our ignorance’s discomfort and need for effort. These patterns are like bullock cart grooves on a mud road (have you seen how cartwheels will be forced into them?); once you get into this trap at the initial technical papers, you will repeat them and keep wondering what the hell is going on.
We write (too frequently) what we know, rather than what is asked for
Another trap is to write what you know rather than what is being asked! Trust me; it happens all the time! Your boss asks something, you eagerly start blabbering all you know, and your boss is struggling to hold back exploding, a credulous expression that says, how can this bright guy be so dumb, he didn’t even listen to what I needed to know yesterday!
How can you break this pattern and make exam day stress-free like any other day? By leveraging on past question papers.
Target to have your three views preparation completed by the time exams are about 5 to 6 weeks away. Now get to the past years’ question papers and indicative solutions. You have quite enough of them, two institutes, ten years, two attempts in a year, so you have 40 question papers at least.
How to move a mountain? One trailer-full at a time!
Pardon the headline; I can’t imagine eating an elephant, veggie 🙂
Select 50 marks from past papers randomly, either on the previous night or first thing in the morning. Then write/type the answers in an hour. You can write relatively shorter answers than you would do in exams; the key is writing in a stressed timeline; you are attempting in 60 minutes.
Then go to your job or whatever. Later in the day, compare your answers with suggested answers. See what you missed, what you needed to read more, ask yourself why you didn’t see what the question was about. Then spend the next couple of hours reading the chapters where you didn’t do well. Update your personal notes.
Better if you do this every day. Target at least 2 to 3 times in the workdays. Weekends could be two attempts per day. This ensures two things. Now you focus only on your weakest points first and incrementally strengthen them. And with this constant pressure of writing in 60 minutes what you would write in 90 minutes in the exam, your exam day will feel like a breeze.
This will be hard. Like starting to run. You will want to quit and start reading core reading chapters as they would be so more comforting. But if you persist, you will see patterns peculiar to you emerge. You will know where you need to get more clarity and seek out help.
Know how others think what you think!
One of the exercises that helped the support program group this time was writing a mock test and then getting yourself marked by at least two others. Marking others is great learning; you start thinking like the examiner! And you will also see how others see holes in your answers that you think couldn’t be anything but perfect! I strongly suggest you do this within a study group at least two weeks before exams.
Maximize the reading time at the beginning of the exam
Those 15 minutes would be significant assets if you did this preparation correctly.
1. Quickly scan through the question papers for out-lay, how many questions, sub-parts, etc.
2. Scan the question; you will have a rough straw-man answer instinctively by practice as you read through. You will also know where you need to spend time thinking. Mark each question as easy, medium, or hard.
3. Develop a plan as to which sequence you will write answers to those questions.
4. Attempt the easy ones first, in the shortest possible time. Remember, you still need to keep a question together, do not write part answers in different parts of the paper. Not sure if you can cut and paste in online exams, but that will be a bonus.
5. Once you have easy parts away, get to attempt the harder ones. Don’t deviate from your straw-man. With enough practice, you will have an excellent overall perspective instinctively, but there is a risk that you start writing in a flow and run over the allotted time; you so much want to write from the latest project that you aced at work and got compliments for!
Hopefully, these tips will help. Please remember that you are not aiming for a pass in the exam but to be a deeply enriched professional! And these studies are developing the foundation; the stronger the foundation, the higher up you will reach in life.
And not the least, I wish you all the best!