ACTEX is pretty widely known as a good manual for P and FM. ASM is another good option, but it tends to overprepare you for the early exams. ASM has been helping students prepare for actuarial exams since 1983. We offer study materials for Exams P, FM, IFM, LTAM, STAM, SRM, PA, MAS-I & II and EA-1, EA-2F and EA-2L, written by an outstanding team of authors. ASM Products are sold at ACTEX Learning Mad River Books and The Actuarial Bookstore.
Posted by4 years ago
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Hi all, I just passed exam p this morning (September-19-2015) and thought I would share some insights with folks.
Personal background: math major in junior year. Didn't take any stats or probability course before. GPA 3.96
https://generousmake.weebly.com/dual-boot-windows-linux.html. Total studying time: I started watching Youtube videos to learn basic probability stuff in July but didn't start studying wholeheartedly until mid August. So I think my total study time was somewhere 120-150 hours.
I searched online constantly for as much as suggestion and tips as I can get. But it was hard because people ask very specific questions so the information is scattered around everywhere on the internet. So in this post I want to combine the tips I got from the internet and from personal experience.
Personal insight of the how one can effectively study for exam p:
- Study the Actex manual. (or any other manual that you found helpful.) Learn the majority of the content but when you bump into something the book says it doesn't show up on the real test often, skip it. Most people would suggest you to buy one but I found the 2009 version online for free. I figured since I'm just learning the materials it wouldn't make much difference if using an older version.
- After you get a good idea of the test content, do SOA 1-130. Let me emphasize '1-130' not '1-240', because after 130 the questions get crazy. And trust me the real testing questions are unlikely to be that hard. So if you don't have unlimited study time, just make sure you can do SOA 1-130 even in your sleep.
- Two weeks before your exam, buy Adapt, and do EL 3-5 practice exams. (DO NOT EXCEED EL 5) I passed exam P with only 5.28 EL, so seriously if you didn't get to a high EL before your sitting, don't worry too much about it. The real exam seems like EL 3-4 on Adapt to me. Some people like to challenge themselves with harder problems and it definitely is good if you have A LOT OF time to study. But IMO, the real exam is not gonna be harder than EL 5, so why scare yourself unnecessarily?
![Exam p manual pdf Exam p manual pdf](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126229488/592250952.jpg)
How I feel about real exam: Like many other posts have said, the real exam is about CONCEPTS. There most likely won't be questions that require time-consuming and troubling calculations. It means to test if you know a certain concept or not.
Most problems I saw on exam p were pretty straight forward. (By saying 'straight forward', I mean that after I understood the question, I had steps in my head of how to solve it right away. There was very little ambiguity. It is either 'you know this concept' or not.
So my overall suggestion is that, if you have very limited time to study and want to make the most out of your time, don't trouble/freak out yourself by doing really hard problems (like TIA practice exams). The real exam is to see if you know most of the concepts of probability and calculus (yes I had two problems that was basically testing if i know how to integrate a certain thing).
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The night before your exam: Instead of doing lots of problems, I would suggest to go over your formula sheet over and over again and make sure you know how to relate different concepts (e.g. cov, conditional variance or conditional expectation).
Because I had very little time to study (taking five classes and have a part time job), I had to skip all the uncommon distributions, even gamma. (I figured if I did happen to see a gamma I would either give up or treat it as an exponential with tabular integration). And it turns out just fine.
Drivers ed of southern maryland. What I'm trying to say is that if you just can't stuff ALL the materials in your brain, don't panick. Make sure you know those important stuff really, really, really well, and you should be fine.
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I'm sorry for making this post this long, but I hope it would help some people who are preparing for exam p. :)
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