Question

STAM practice exam too many repeated questions

Answer 1

I haven’t taken STAM yet (taking it this sitting), but something I have done to really drill in the shortcuts for STAM is to bring up credibility and MLE questions and do the questions from first principles and then through the shortcut method. Yes, repeated questions mean you’ll be able to just see what the answer is as soon as it comes up, but if you force yourself to calculate the posterior using first principles it’ll drill the concepts into you and cover you in the event that you get a weird question in the exam you can set the shortcut up for. After that, I also use flashcards for a bunch of the shortcuts to make sure I have them down to a T.

Marginal improvements up until the exam, good luck this week

Answer 2

Make sure you know how to calculate the expected payment per payment from first principles. Meaning there's no given distribution to calculate the x cap therefore you have to calculate by hand using the integral.

Answer 3

Wait let me try to understand this properly. You are doing level 5 SOA *only* problems?

Imo this is not an ideal strategy. I agree, if you are limited on time, you should focus on SOA problems. But, you should focus on a blend of all SOA problems, not just level 5. The exam in aggregate will be about a level 5, but that will be a mix of various difficulties.

Also, CA made questions are just as useful imo. There’s only so many ways that you can ask these questions, and I think CA does a fantastic job of creating questions that were similar to the actual exam.

Good luck!

Edit: I see now that you were doing level 5 exams, which means you were likely already getting a blend of various levels. I also see now that you’ve done 40 exams. You will almost definitely breeze through the actual exam imo, that’s a ton of practice. I think I did around 20 practice exams and crushed the exam. I don’t want to give you false hope of course, but just wanted to say I think you’re doing a good job. Like I said though, don’t be afraid to do some CA made exams, they’re very useful!

Answer 4

I have the similar issue. I already exhausted almost all 1200 questions from CA question bank, so the practice exam’s score is not meaningful anymore. All I can do rn is to identify my weakest area and redo the wrong questions, memorize those MLE shortcuts.