Pass Rate

71% of CA3 students failed.

Discuss.

 

Why do you feel 71% failed?

CA3 is well known for a low pass rate.

The reasons for this are numerous:
1. Students generally are ill-prepared
2. Students misunderstand the purpose, it is about communicating not showing how clever you are.
3. Students study this with another subject and in preparation tend to neglect CA3.
4. Students does not seem to have the adequate preparation in their WBS - spelling and proper writing cannot be taught in a 50 hour subject.

There maybe be other reasons as well, but I think the above sums up the major reasons.

 

5. Many actuarial students are good at spelling and proper writing. This is probably a handicap when it comes to passing CA3.

 

What do you consider 'proper writing'? If you mean to your peers using jargon and reliance on formulae etc, that will cause a failure.

Any idea is that each question is unique. There is no right answer unlike CT exams where some people get by purely by being good at memorising or plugging in numbers. Its no proof they understand and can explain their answers.

You could even say that 'proper writing' is in fact grammatically incorrect. Should it be 'writing properly'?

 

It's a well known fact (on the internet, anyway) that any post which posits the superiority of the poster's grammatical and spelling skills will in fact contain at least one grammatical or spelling error.

 

Quite so - bystander should have had "It's" instead of "Its"

I thought about putting scare quotes around "spelling and proper writing", but decided that that would have been priggish, and perhaps a bit rude. [To spell it out, I was quoting capitalH there, in an apparently failed attempt at sarcasm. Apologies.]

My serious point is this. I've known several people who are perfectly good at communicating difficult ideas in plain language, who have good exam technique, and who haven't shirked on preparation, and yet have failed CA3 6 or even 10 times. At least three of these have qualified on CA3, and at least one still hasn't qualified, having passed all the other exams years ago. I just hope that I don't end up that way.

To be fair, I also know one or two highly literate people who have passed CA3 at the first attempt, but in my experience this is the exception rather than the rule.

 

My comments may have been a tad one-sided, so I will take that one on the chin.

To put my comments into perspective:
I regularly see letters etc. drafted by other people where the writing is shocking. These same people declined to go on a business writing course as they believed they did not need it. What makes it worse is this is done with a computer (how do you spell a word incorrectly if the computer shows you with a red line it is wrong?).

Why did they fail? I do not know. I do know however that most people cannot write a one page letter, with ample time, access to a computer, without having to rewrite the thing. So I will stand by my comment, but will admit that there may be outliers that fail because of the subjective nature of the marking, but not 71%. I do not think it is even 10%.

 

CA3 pass rate

I may have missed the point here, but since CA3 is converting from an exam to a 2 day course this year, my guess would be that the pass rate will improve, and probably by quite a lot. Historically, new courses have been marked relatively generously I believe (and it can't get much lower any way).

Its a shame you now can't take it until you've passed CA1 though (which i'm taking later this year), otherwise I'd try taking CA3 as soon as possible.

 

I believe the same thing about new courses but, this will only be temporary. I do not know what the long term impact on CA3 pass rates would be.

I do think that the course will be more relevant in a WBS kind of way (designing a presentation on paper?), but it will also present new challenges. I can see the following in the examiners report: "Most candidates presented the data in an overcomplicated way, which also left them with too little time to polish the presentation." The pass rate for CA2 confirms my theory (for me in any case).

However, if pass rates do improve, it will give everyone who has done CA3 the old way a chance to gloat "when I wrote CA3 it was still a proper exam with low pass rates, not this easy-peasy stuff you did".

 

Small numbers but the course pass rate isn't that much higher. I believe there is still a written component and perhaps that is what keeps the rate low.

My only advice is always give your all to preparation etc. On the day, go in with no resentment and treat each question as unique. Just because there is when similar historically, they are assessing your style. Trying to mimic another could be dangerous.

Keep going everyone!!

 

I think we may have already missed the boat on that one. Pass rate was 32% on the latest 2-day course for which results have been posted (3/4 Nov 2009).

Update: Pass rate was 62% for the second November 2009 course. Running total so far is 53%, range from 32% to 70% for individual courses. There've been 8 courses so far with results published.

Another update: Running total down to 51% after the 37% pass rate on the course that was run in March. Still better than the 21% achieved on the final written paper in April