Jennifer - Actuarial

My exams have now descended. I've sat two papers, with one more to go. I'll be on tenderhooks until results day, which is much too far away.

My first exam, Financial Economics, mostly involved using various methods to price derivatives. Derivatives are financial instruments whose value is derived from the value of something else. Eg. A European Call option, which is the right to buy a share at a set price and date in the future. It's hard to tell how the exam went, half of the exam was almost too easy to believe, and the other half incredibly tough. The pass marks are dependent on how everyone else did, so whilst I think I got a respectable mark, I imagine that there won't be many students scoring less than 60%, in which case, the pass mark gets higher.

In Contingencies, my second exam, I got my perfect paper. The paper was very unusual and concentrated on one topic, whilst ignoring most of the others. Luckily, this was my strongest area so hopefully I have a definite advantage there. Unfortunately I did make a couple of careless mistakes on the big questions so fingers crossed I won't be penalised too heavily for that.

My final paper, Economics is this Friday, so I'm counting down the days until freedom, whilst being fairly sure that I don't have time to count (This one's graphs not numbers!). Lots of people who have taken this before have found this exam okay, but I'm not convinced. It's 40% multiple choice which should be ok, apart from that it's 60% graphs and words. My forte is definitely in numbers and calculations so I'm not looking forward to it.

If these 3 exams go well, I'll have 8 down, and 7 to go, it would be amazing to be the right side of half way through them. However, with pass rates of around 50%, my chances of passing all three are fairly slim (12.5%). For the meantime, I'll be concentrating in getting back into work and reclaiming the social life that I have for 3 months of the 6 month sitting.