SOA exam P on Tuesday

[thodges314]

So, months of work come down to Tuesday. I spent most of winter holiday working on Guo's manual (in great detail), and have been slightly neglecting some of my harder classes this semester in favour of constantly studying.
I got the P sample question pool and worked through those as well, over time, and actually most of them several times. I had my computer choose 50 sets of 30 numbers 1 to 124, and have been working through those sets of problems as if it is a test, then checking my answers, coming up with a percentage correct, and I have a tally for each question where I have the running number of times that I have answered that question correctly (it gets reset to 0 if I mess up) and the total number of times that I have gotten that question wrong. I wish that I could tell my computer to select random questions favouring those that have low running totals untill I get all running totals up to 5 or something (like a brilliant macintosh flashcard programme called Einstein) but my time is better spent studying then writing computer programs right now. I started to realise that a lot of my errors were coming from silly little things that mean I am overworking myself.

So yesterday I printed out the May 2003 exam (most current one online) and took it and got a 75%. After I went through the removed all of the problems not like those in the current set (mostly pure calculus and I think most correct) I got it down from 40 to 24 problems with an average of 80% (sounds like a percentage problem, huh?).

I asked one of my colleagues about the P exam, and he said that most of the problems were not like those in the practice sets. However, I happen to know that this guy got a 5 and only studied for about 30 hours and made some other claims that make me question his credibility.

I've worked out that there are maybe a handfull of problems that challange me everytime that I run into them, and that I should be working on those at this point instead of doing all the practice exams and wasting so much time on the easy problems.

Also there is a study group monday evening (it starts at nine pm. my exam is at 8 am tuesday so I WAS hoping to be asleep by 10) which if the school ends up being closed monday I won't be able to go to (there was a shooting today). I'm thinking that I might actually want to arrange for a taxi to pick me up in case my car doesn't want to start in the cold (in which case it would also be too cold to bicycle).

Anyway, there is not really a question here but just a series of ramblings. Thanks for reading.

P.S. On the may 2003 practice exam it took about 2.5 hours to get through 40 problems. (I gave myself 4 hours for 40 instead of 30 problems).