Moreover, how did they get around without a huge corpus of past problems to churn through?
I managed to get through 1,2,MLC, and 4 by reading the syllabus textbooks and then going through the SOA pdfs of past exam problems. It was probably that corpus of nicely-prepared past exam problems that got me through it, rather than the actual readings themselves. But that was contingent upon having taken exam after it had been administered for several years, so the accumulated exam problems were just neatly prepared for me.
Then I found out people use manuals. Man these are convenient! Everything conveniently packaged. Just read the summaries, do the problems, and you should be good to go as long as you prepared carefully. Exam-pass-in-a-box!
Nowadays I use a manual, along with the source papers. Seems like everyone else uses one too. I might have encountered maybe 1 or 2 die-hards who only read source material but the other 99% use a manual. Thanks TIA! Thank you for compiling all those past exam problems for me so I don't have to manually flip through every past exam scouring for relevant problems.
How did you people pass the exams without those giant pdfs of old problems? Did you guys make up your own problems? Did you just do the end-of-chapter problems and went into the exam room feeling prepared?
What about papers that don't have end-of-paper practice problems? Did you just make up your own problems from there and hope they would be similar to what the CAS asked?
How did you get past exam problems before the internet? Did you have to order a big batch of them from the CAS through the mail?
I managed to get through 1,2,MLC, and 4 by reading the syllabus textbooks and then going through the SOA pdfs of past exam problems. It was probably that corpus of nicely-prepared past exam problems that got me through it, rather than the actual readings themselves. But that was contingent upon having taken exam after it had been administered for several years, so the accumulated exam problems were just neatly prepared for me.
Then I found out people use manuals. Man these are convenient! Everything conveniently packaged. Just read the summaries, do the problems, and you should be good to go as long as you prepared carefully. Exam-pass-in-a-box!
Nowadays I use a manual, along with the source papers. Seems like everyone else uses one too. I might have encountered maybe 1 or 2 die-hards who only read source material but the other 99% use a manual. Thanks TIA! Thank you for compiling all those past exam problems for me so I don't have to manually flip through every past exam scouring for relevant problems.
How did you people pass the exams without those giant pdfs of old problems? Did you guys make up your own problems? Did you just do the end-of-chapter problems and went into the exam room feeling prepared?
What about papers that don't have end-of-paper practice problems? Did you just make up your own problems from there and hope they would be similar to what the CAS asked?
How did you get past exam problems before the internet? Did you have to order a big batch of them from the CAS through the mail?
How did actuaries pass exams before study manuals?