“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” -Derek Sivers
We spent a lot of time researching and writing about how to improve study habits for the actuarial exams. However, none of that information makes a difference if it’s not put into practice.
Even after writing a book about optimal study habits, I sometimes struggled to implement them. It’s hard to change a routine.
However, I found one thing that eased the transition: study audits.
Struggling to implement spaced review sessions
Spaced review sessions (discussed in our sample chapter) were one of the hardest habits to pick up.
I scheduled study sessions at the end of the month to review what I’d learned. But when these days drew near, I had the urge to skip them.
I had all sorts of reasons. I felt behind, and I wanted to crank through a new section of the syllabus. I would review the material in a few months anyway. But the biggest resistance is that I didn’t really know how to spend the review time.
Reading a new section was a familiar and clear task: read 20 pages and take notes. A “review session” was vague and open-ended.
Two things helped me stay on track:
1. Add structure to the open-ended review sessions.
Instead of planning a vague review session at the end of the month, I wrote down what I needed to accomplish during this review (e.g. do X problems per section, or write a summary of how the section relates to the syllabus).
Now the review days were just as structured as normal days of reading new material, so there was less resistance to start.
2. Remind myself why the review sessions were so critical.
When I felt tired and wanted to skip a review day, I remembered that the 1-hour review session could save me several hours of review later on (refer to the forgetting curve graph in our sample chapter).
The second point led me to introduce a new habit into my weekly study schedule: study audits.
Study audits – keeping yourself accountable
If you’ve read Actuarial Exam Tactics: Learn More, Study Less, you’ve seen the one-page “Cheat Sheets” at the end of each chapter.
I made these Cheat Sheets for myself. I wanted a checklist to stay accountable in my study sessions. I wanted to practice what we preached.
While studying for my last exam, I set aside 10 minutes at the end of each week to conduct a study audit. I used the Cheat Sheets to “grade” my study sessions for the week. Which of the study skills did I use well, and which ones could I use better?
After this reflection, I made any necessary adjustments so I could be more effective and efficient during the next week.
I used these study audits as a feedback mechanism to create a process of continuous improvement. They helped me bridge the gap between reading and implementing the information from our book.
Not only did these study audits help me improve my study skills, but they made study sessions more interesting. They served as a source of motivation. Instead of viewing each study session as a chore that I needed to get done, I viewed it as a skill that I was working to improve.
Final thoughts
As actuarial students, we spend hundreds of hours in isolated study. We don’t have a teacher or coach to provide feedback, so we must cultivate the self-awareness to give ourselves feedback.
These weekly study audits (with the Cheat Sheets from our book) helped me stay on track with implementing better study habits, and they ultimately pushed me to become a better learner – I encourage you to give them a try!
Study Smart, Pass Fast, Live Life
Mike & Roy
I have read your book but implementing these study habits is difficult as said. I feel I am a person who overthinks all the time and cannot concentrate while trying to focus on the study sessions. Any advice on how to tacke this problem?
Hi Sumeet,
The best way to implement the study habits is to focus on one at a time. For example, start with the spacing effect. Dedicate one study session per week to review material from the prior week. After a few weeks of repeating this habit, you can choose another study habit to add. Working through the book in this manner makes it less intimidating.
As for focusing during your study sessions, I recommend a similar approach: break your study session into small chunks. You can set a goal to read Section X for 25 minutes, and then take a 5-minute break. During these 25 minutes, silence your phone and remove distractions. You can set another 25-minute study session in the same day where you work on 5 practice problems related to what you read. When you break your studying into smaller sessions it becomes less intimidating than trying to focus for a single, 2-hour session. Hope this helps, and feel free to follow up with further questions.
Hi Mike and Roy,
First of all I want to say thank you for sharing the great great methods of studying in your book, I have known one or two techniques but your effort of gathering and put them in a logical order is awesome.
I also want to ask some questions, which is the problem that I’m facing right now. I’m studying preliminary exam, MLC and C (for purpose compare the effect of new way of studying). I find that I have some kind of fear, the fear is that without write down “enough” solutions for “enough” problems, I won’t be able to perform the level of calculation which is needed in the exam. So I always want to come back the old method, that is solving all the problems as well as practice exams and past exams. The reason for this fear I think is that without enough repetition, I cannot perfect some action, in this case solving the problem in real exam. Do you experience the same thing, how do you overcome it?
I also have question for exam C, since this exam seemingly cover different topics with a lots of formulas to remember, which is contrast with exam MLC, where you can understand the topics intuitively. I work in life insurance company so I find that the material in MLC is quite familiar. Do you have any specific strategy for exam C?
One again, thank you so much for the great action you do for actuarial community.
Cheer!
Aaron Truong
Aaron, changing study habits is difficult, so I understand your concern about reducing the amount of practice problems. I think it’s important to clarify our position – when we say reducing the number of practice problems, we are not trying to advocate laziness in putting in less effort. On the contrary, we advocate quality over quantity with practice problems, putting more effort into each problem rather than going on autopilot just to complete an arbitrary number of questions. This quality approach results in fewer study hours as you are more mindful with the time you spend.
With that in mind, the most important thing to remember when changing your approach is to focus on how well you understand the concepts rather than on how many problems you attempt. Here are a few exercises you can try that exemplify the “quality” approach we are trying to describe:
* After completing a problem, ask yourself how your approach would have changed if X assumption was changed in the question. For example, what if the force of interest was not constant when valuing whole life insurance? What if the death benefit varied as a function of time rather than being a constant value? What if you used the Woolhouse approximation instead of uniform distribution of deaths? In one practice problem, you can cover a wide variety of concepts and compare/contrast the different approaches and their effect on your calculation.
* If you struggle with a practice problem, revisit it a week later to see if you learned from your mistakes and can solve the problem the second time around. The key is to let enough time pass so you do not rely on a memorized solution. Many students overlook this approach – they power through new problems and can make similar mistakes over and over. The purpose of the practice problems should be to evaluate your understanding and point out gaps. Be intentional about reviewing and filling in these gaps, and then retest yourself to make sure the knowledge sticks.
Hopefully, that helps you transition away from focusing on the quantity of practice problems. You will gain confidence from developing versatility with the above approaches – you don’t need to practice every problem available because you understand the concepts deep enough to adapt to any question they throw at you. You can still use practice exams to score yourself and gain confidence in your understanding, but you don’t need to complete every past exam in order to pass.
For Exam C, we agree that the syllabus initially seems more disjointed than MLC. This makes the spacing effect even more critical. In MLC, you naturally get spaced reviews of material when later sections build off the early ones. In Exam C, you must be more intentional about scheduling spaced reviews so you don’t forget early material and form the less obvious connections. When you study each section in-depth and make frequent comparisons back to prior sections, you make connections such as:
Frequency and severity models form the basis of aggregate loss models, which are used to calculate insurance losses (with different parameters such as deductibles and limits). To create these frequency/severity models, you can take an empirical or parametric approach – each approach has different methods to fit model parameters and evaluate the acceptability of the model. You can improve these models by incorporating historical experience (credibility methods). You can see that these various syllabus sections are actually closely related to help you understand the different considerations that go into actuarial modeling.
Of course, you can’t expect to make these connections at first. There are dozens of formulas when you dig into the manual, and this makes the material seem confusing and disjointed. But spaced review sessions help you step back and find the intuition behind the formulas, recognizing the basic principles that they represent.
Thanks for taking the time to write these questions and read our book, and I hope this answer provides some useful details for your MLC and C preparations.
Hi Mike and Roy,
Your answer definitely helps me with two great insights, first is the way to create new kind of problem and deeper understand about concepts, second is the way I should view the problem as some feedback tool to test my understanding.
I want also to comment and emphasis a little bit on the method that you suggest: substitute the assumption on the question. This method I see not only help me to create a new problem, but it can also be used to understand a hard concept. For example, when I learn a concept in study manual and tackle some problems such as using Gaussian distribution to calculate something. What I do is I try to substitute the simpler distribution, something I am more familiar with, like changing the “vague” Gaussian distribution to uniform distribution and have a look at it. After understanding the “simpler version”, it definitely help me understand the concept. This is some thing that I found when I using this method.
Thank you again for the sharing.
Cheer!
Aaron, that’s a great strategy for tackling difficult concepts. I appreciate you sharing, and I know others will benefit from trying out the substitution/simplification method as well.