Customer Reviews

Study Guide and Solutions Manual for Exam P of the Society of Actuaries (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Deciding which prep books to get for Exam P is very much a exercise in cost-benefit analysis. Which ones should you buy? The following are the independent opinionated ratings of one student who has just passed Exam P.

I did NOT want to have to take this exam twice, so I spent about $220 buying guides by Guo, ASM, and Gannon. (Funny, since that was more than the $175 exam fee to take the exam.) A fellow student of mine who already passed P passed along her ACTEX guide.

Essential:

Guo, 11th ed. (2008), $85+, rating: 9/10
If you can only afford one guide, get this one - though you will need a computer to read it, since it is sold as a PDF file, and not as a hard copy (- the reason why I didn't give it a 10/10). Guo does a fantastic job of explaining the relationships between distributions, and I wish I had this book as a supplemental resource for a probability course I took last spring. (For example, he lucidly relates the pdf and CDF of a gamma distribution to those of a Poisson distribution.) He also provides several handy shortcuts (ex. to avoid integrating by parts when dealing with exponential distributions) and valuable practical tips (including a section on which calculators to use, and how). While he doesn't include many practice problems, he does reference problems in old exams released by the SOA.

SOA, 134 Sample Problems (2008), free, available online - rating: 8/10
The level of difficulty of problems on the actual test I took were similar to that of these sample problems. You can partition them into four 30-question practice tests.

Optional:

ASM, 9th ed (2008), $87+, rating: 6/10
This book has 18 practice tests, including many questions culled from old SOA exams dating from 2001 back to 1979. Many of the tests are designed to be more difficult than the actual exam, and cover advanced topics. If you already have a good grasp of basic probability concepts these tests are useful for moving on to more advanced topics (such as order statistics), but for someone just starting out these tests could be more discouraging than enlightening, especially since the author is not all that great at elucidating concepts. (I got the same feeling after an email Q&A exchange with the author.) While the author gives his own detailed explanation for the solution to each question, it was often more obscure than the original explanation given by the SOA. Sometimes more is less. The crammed typesetting doesn't help readability either. Get this one only if you've already gone through SOA's 134 problems and you need more practice pacing yourself on exams.

ACTEX (2006), $87+, rating: 6/10
This is a decent spiral-bound hard-copy reference, the one that I took on the road when I attended a summer workshop out-of-state. I like the layout of this book the best, as it is written in TeX. (Guo, ASM, and Gannon are all typeset with Microsoft Word and MathType - ew!) A balanced book with easy to navigate chapter and subchapter headings. Not as good as Guo, however, at drawing connections between different distributions. Get this one only if you need a hard-copy guide to take on the road.

Worthless:

Gannon, 2nd ed., (2002), $25, rating: 2/10
This was the first prep book I bought when I first became aware of SOA, because it was the only one (out of the ones reviewed here) listed on Amazon.com. Not up-to-date, terrible layout (worse than ASM's). Avoid.

This book is good in the fact that there are a lot of problems to be solved, but there is no thorough explanation on any of the solutions. Also, there are so many mistakes in this book. For the review questions at the end of each chapter, sometimes the answers in the back of the book don't even match the question to which they are numbered. Nobody took time to proofread the problems with the solutions. Also, some of the solutions are wrong...period. I'm obviously not a Probability genius, but I'm able to point out several miscalculations.

So, this book is only good in the fact that there are hundreds of problems with answers in the back, but it is certainly not worth buying. Go ACTEX instead.

Please avoid this book at all cost. If you use this book, master everything in it, and think that you're ready for the exam, you're in for a big surprise. Use other online bookstores that specialize in books for actuarial exams and save yourself from wasting time and money. [...]

I studied the book only and passed the exam (I'm not even science major). Perfect book to study and review for the exam