Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Veni, Vidi, Flunki

Today was T-day. I packed my calculator, my calculator backup and my mechanical pencil and headed off to take my Actuarial exam.

Faced with a 30 question, 2.5 hour exam, I estimated that I would feel confident on 10 questions, iffy on 10 and completely clueless on the last 10.

Reality of the breakdown was: confident on 5, iffy on 15 and clueless on 10. Why on earth can I not remember ANY of the formulas for bonds, and I swear as I am sitting here I know how to do a Macaulay duration before I got up this morning.

Oh, well, I knew I'd flunk, but now I have some valuable lessons:

1. Do NOT try to learn anything new 1 week and closer to the exam. Spend that time making sure you are solid on what you already know.

2. Do NOT waste cartloads of time breaking down formulas. Reduce and simply and THEN break apart.

3. Read the question carefully... twice... before deciding there isn't enough information to answer it.

4. A death in the family 1 week prior to the exam really screws up your study rhythm... another post for another day.

3 comments:

Mayberry said...

Oh no -- I am sorry, about it all!

MPPs Mom said...

oh no.....that stinks. I'm sorry. Will you take it again? How long do you have to wait before it's offerred again?

HUGS

Anonymous said...

Wow that's tough. I can remeber a genetics test in college like that. Actually, I believe all of the exams I took in school were about fifty percent when I took them. I usually did alright, but in genetics I usually did worse than I thought. (Thank goodness for a curve.) You sound like a brilliant person with enough smarts to pass almost any exam that comes your way. Good Luck. i hope you did better than you think.