Well I’ve just passed the SOA P Exam yesterday. And I have a few thoughts about the test prep process as well as resources I’d like to share.

P Exam

My initial thought is that the exam is fairly easier than the prep material I used. Which was the Broverman ACTEX study manual. The practice exams were grossly inaccurate representations of the actual difficulty level. Not sure how much I can talk about the exam

Resources

Freebies

There’s this awesome professor, MB Finan, at ATU who made free study manuals for all the preliminary exams. The best part is that unlike the other study manuals out there, his is written in latex. The math is just so much easier to read than whatever was used to typeset Broverman’s study manual. At some point Broverman was using \(\phi\) instead of \(\varnothing\) to denote the empty set.

Also, I found the free practice exams at The Infinte Actuary to be the most accurate in representing the difficulty level of the actual exam.

There’s also these websites with compilations of free resources for the preliminary exams, they include compilations of past exam questions too:

• University of Chicago
• Michigan State University

That’s basically the free resources that I’ve encountered so far.

Expensive Stuff

For the stuff you have to pay for, you can buy the study manuals off of The Actuarial Bookstore or the ACTEX website. Although, you aren’t only limited to the study manuals, there’s also textbooks that have been reviewed by SOA and they’re nice enough to list out the relevant sections of each of the reviewed texts.

Broverman Study Manual Review

Apparently Broverman’s P Exam study manual was supposed to be cream of the crop, I however, feel differently at least for the 2015 edition. The diagrams illustrating concepts and the math equations didn’t look as crisp as you would expect from a textbook or document from a professor. Additionally, I wonder where the editors were looking, as mentioned earlier, when the wrong symbols were used. Also, the grouped SOA questions, didn’t correspond to the chapters they were assigned to. I also felt the chapters didn’t really teach much, and instead just listed a bunch of properties to memorize. You’re better off studying off of some free probability course on Coursera, wikipedia for distributions, and practicing doing calculus.