Actuary Exam P/1 Preparation

MATH4010, Spring semester, 2015

Instructor: Yizao Wang
Email: yizao.wang@uc.edu
Office: 4302 French Hall
Office Hours: W 1:30-3:15pm, otherwise by appointment.
Class meeting: Thur 11-noon, 4206 French Hall.

Course description

Preparation for Actuary Exam P/1.

Grades

Take-home midterm and final exams.

Preparation materials for SOA/CAS Exam P/1

• A Probability Course for the Actuaries by Marcel B. Finan
  download a PDF copy (version July 8, 2014. Might differ from the latest version at authors' website in the future.)
• Sample online actuarial exams are available from http://www.saab.org/actuarialmuorg.cgi
• Offical websites of SOA and CAS.
• Website of Be an actuary.

Tentative Schedule

Some of students have planned to take the exam in late March. The class is adjusted then accordingly. I will follow the structure of the A/S/M Manual for Exam P/Exam 1 Probability, 16-th Edition, by Dr. Krzysztof Ostaszewski. I will cover all the materials at least once by late Feburary according to the following schedule.

Students are strongly recommended to guarantee enough time to work out at least 5 sets of practice exams before taking the real one.

In class I will talk about examples from SOA/CAS Exam P/1 Sample Questions (Solutions) for most of the knowledge points. The sample question numbers are listed after the corresponding knowledge points below. I will talk about questions from recommended ones below.

• Week 1 (01/11-01/17): organizational meeting.
• Week 2 (01/18-01/24, MLK): introduction.
• Week 3 (01/25-01/31): Section 3 (following last week):
  Joint and marginal distributions (77-79, 88-94, 100, 110, 111, 117-119)
  Independence of random variables (76, 101, 102)
  Conditional distribution (111-115)
  Covariance (104-107)
  Important Examples
  
  Section 1:
  Basic probability concepts
  Conditional probability
  Bayes Theorem
  Combinatorial probability
  (1-17, 19-28)
  
  Recommended: 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114, 115, 7, 13, 19, 24.


• Week 4 (02/01-02/07): Section 2:
  Random variables (32-34)
  Expected value and other distribution parameters (44-56, 60-67)
  Moment generating function (57, 58, 130, 137)
  Percentile, mode, skewness, kurtosis, standardized random variables (68-70)
  Chebyshev's Inequality
  Transformation of a random variable (36, 37, 40, 71-75)
  Frequently used distributions (29-31, 41, 153)


Recommended: 29-32, 34, 40, 42, 44, 48, 60, 68, 73.


• Week 5 (02/08-02/14): Section 2 continued.
  
  Section 3:
  Moment generating function of a joint distribution (95, 98)
  Multivariate transformations
  Convolution
  Mixed distributions (135, 145, 148, 149)
  
  Recommended: 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 145, 149. (The last 20 problems seem to be much more difficult than previous ones.)
  
  
• Week 6 (02/15-02/21): Section 3
  The Central Limit Theorem (80-87)
  Order statistics
  Commonly used multivariate distributions
  
  
• Week 7 (02/22-02/28)
• Week 8 (03/01-03/07)
• Week 9 (03/08-03/14)
• Week 10 (03/15-03/21): Spring Break. Good luck for the exam!

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