Link: Notes of the Meeting of the Student Consultative Forum held on Friday, 27 November 2009 at Staple Inn Hall 

Thanks to those of you who provided feedback ahead of the Actuarial Profession’s Student Consultative Forum meeting on 27 November. I raised all your comments at the meeting.

Please find attached draft minutes from the meeting. These will also be available on the FASS website. Here are some particular points worth noting and answers which are in response to your comments and questions:

Admin Aspects

• Exam Entry Permits: From April 2010, these will include details of the reading time, as well as exam start and end time. The confusion surrounding the most recent CA3 exam has been reported to the examiners.
• Invigilators’ conduct: There will be an Invigilators Training Day early in the new year. This will stress that they should not create a distraction and should be attentive for students requiring assistance (e.g. extra paper).
• Cost of CT9: This is run at cost price and has not increased in price in recent years. The Registrar is reviewing external suppliers and arrangements to see if costs can be reduced whilst still maintaining good feedback from participates. In particular, they are trialling removing the requirement to stay overnight.
• Practice Module: This isn’t necessary to qualify however it is currently required as part of the Practice Certificate regime for reserved roles (but this may be reviewed soon).
• CT9 and Practice Module online tests: New software for these is due to go live in Jan/Feb 2010. This will allow takers to go back and forward between questions and change answers, enabling better time management.

Educational Content

• All comments regarding specific papers and questions are passed on to the relevant Principal Examiner, so it’s worth making them. However, the profession’s representatives are far less willing to compromise on these issues than on the admin-type stuff above.
• Notwithstanding this, they did agree with comments that the recent CT8 paper was difficult, and said this was taking into account in the marking process.

Other points of potential interest

• Student Voting Rights: There was strong feeling from student reps that students should have a say in decisions affecting the future of the profession. However, the current constitutions clearly state that, unfortunately, we do not get a vote. The Forum did agree to press the Joint Councils on this issue, with a view of getting a change made when the current constitutions are updated (e.g. if/when a merger takes place). If successful, this would ensure that in future such decisions, students would be able to vote.
• Review of Fail Grades: This has been conducted and will be implemented from the April 2010 results onwards. The objective is to provide grades that are more “informative”. The FA band will be narrowed (e.g. receiving an FA would mean you were extremely close to a Pass); the FB and FC grades would both be broadened; and a FD would indicate an “extremely poor” attempt. It was suggested that the bands be relabelled as F1, …, F4 to draw attention to the change and to prevent direct comparison between the two methodologies.
• CA2/CA3 – New criteria: From July 2010, to sit CA2 we will have to have passed/be exempted from all the CTs (including CT9). A similar criteria already applies for the CA3 course (but not for the final exam in April 2010), although in addition we must also have passed CA1.
• September 2010 results dates: I know this seems like a long way away (!), but the Profession has confirmed there was a mistake when these dates were published. This has now been updated on the website: The non-CT results will be published shortly before Christmas 2010, similar to this year, and not in the week between Christmas Day and New Years’ Day as previously indicated.
• CTs in the afternoon?: As you’ll know, the CTs exams take place in the mornings with the rest in the afternoons. There was a suggestion that, as people tend to be more focussed and perform better in the morning, the “easier” CTs subjects should be moved to the afternoons to allow the “harder” other subjects to have the morning slots. This wasn’t agreed upon, but merely a suggestion from one of the student reps. It may well come up again for discussion. Your views on it would be welcome!

The next meeting of this Forum is in May. If you would like to know more before then or to discuss any of the above issues further, please feel free to get in touch with your FASS Company Rep or me directly.