Summary - points covered by Audit Trail

[Epsilon7]

Hello,

After practicing a few paper 2 past exams , I noticed that I spend too much time going through the points stated in the audit trail in my summary report.
I understand that examiners don`t want to see a copy and paste version and they don`t want you to be too brief.

Any advice as to how this can be dealt with , as a bigger chunk of the marks are in the results and comments sections.
Thanks

 

[Lucy England]

I agree that getting the balance right here can be tricky as you don't want to waste time on this section and lose out on results / conclusions / next steps marks! I've given a bit of advice below - hope it helps

Have a look at a few marking schemes for past Paper 2s and look at the marks available for describing what's going on in the model (I assume this is what you mean when you mention the points stated in the audit trail). Marking schemes are available in the Examiner's Report when you download past papers.

The marking schemes break down what the Examiners are expecting you to explain in the 'Approach' section of your summary report. You'll probably want to look out for the section titled 'Methodology' for this info. Describing the modelling approach can be worth something like 20 marks, so it is a fair chunk of the paper. There's usually one or two marks for describing each of the key modelling steps carried out.

Bear in mind that the audience for the summary report is a senior actuary, who doesn't have the spreadsheet in front of them. You'll therefore need to avoid referring to any specific parts of the spreadsheet in the summary.

Perhaps you could have a look at the marking schemes for the papers you tried, then try writing out the Approach section of the summary document again. Try to keep your drafting time to maybe half an hour. This should give you a bit more practice without having to do an entire new paper. The past papers come with model solutions that you can compare your own answers against.

 

[Epsilon7]

Hello Lucy,

Thanks for the response.
When writing the summary report for paper 2, can we copy and paste some of the contents of the provided Audit Trail and changes the wordings and delete spreadsheet references to save a few minutes ( I find this part very time consuming).
Is this acceptable ?

 

[Lucy England]

I don't think you'll get many marks for copying and pasting large parts of the audit trail, as the style required in the summary document is different. The IFoA's Guide to CP2 says this approach is not advised:

"In Paper 2, you must write the Summary document without the use of template headings and without copying large sections from the Examination Question (including the audit trail found within this paper). Candidates who copy large sections of the information in the exam question and/or the audit trail provided into their Summary document, without consideration of the purpose of the Summary document or the target audience, are likely to gain very little credit from the examiners."​

(BTW - I definitely recommend reading this guide if you haven't already as it's got a lot of helpful info in it.)

I'd say you can use the audit trail as 'inspiration' in the relevant sections of the summary, but the descriptions can generally be a bit higher level.

The exception to this is copying across the assumptions from the audit trail - it's usually OK to just bring these across (assuming you haven't changed any of the assumptions you're making as a result of the additional modelling). There's usually one mark available for 'restating assumptions from the audit' on marking schemes.