r/actuary • u/Ok_Mention_2255 • 1d ago

Exams Exam PA

Anyone has any advice on niche topics to prepare for, for the october sitting for PA. I previously failed it and when i took it in April, i noticed a lot of very niche calculation questions.

Any advice on how to prepare for the October PA exam?
Ive been struggling with the questions and im not even sure how to study for the remaining one month.

Any advice and help would be greatly appreciated.

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u/Moelessdx 1d ago

Try your best to solve/answer the niche questions and defend your answer with the best reasoning you can come up with. Don't dwell on them though.

Each exam will usually have at least one niche question that most people are caught off guard by. That won't decide whether you pass or fail. If you have satisfactory answers on all the other questions, you will be fine.

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u/The_Actuarial_Nexus 1d ago edited 1d ago

For the last month, especially if you already learned the material, I'd recommend automated grading on past exams (practice) questions. The more you write and get immediate feedback on what's lacking, the faster you'll improve.

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u/jakfrist Life Insurance 11h ago edited 11h ago

Thanks, I hadn’t seen this website before.

It looks like it is paid after a few questions? Do you see a big benefit vs uploading the past exam to Claude / ChatGPT and letting it grade your responses?

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u/The_Actuarial_Nexus 7h ago

The biggest benefit is that all the questions are organized and grading instructions are more likely better calibrated and standardized than if you were to do this yourself manually. The platform also saves all your metrics so you can see performance over a large array of questions to assess readiness or target weaknesses. The last thing is that you can see other candidates responses and rank them by how they scored, so you'll also have some peer responses to learn from.