Actuarial major here (early 2000s). These exams are indeed quite hard - and if not hard (by someone's personal definition), just cover such a grotesque amount of material for a single exam that by the time you get to the last 20% of the syllabus, the first 80% feels like another lifetime ago.
I have passed three of the SOA (society of actuary) exams, and wrote a fourth and bombed it in ~2005 and never wrote again - returned for a compsci degree instead. Each exam took 300-400 hours of study time. I have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who is a designated actuary.
Don’t let that sample question in the article fool you; most the exam questions all involve extensive use of integrals, differential equations, and other voodoo I’ve long forgotten to solve problems. Some questions can take upwards of solid page of equations to solve - some are outright dirty tricks with every possible exam answer carefully chosen to be the result of making a mis-calculation somewhere. Even relatively simple discrete mathematical questions can really throw you off in the heat of an exam. Also some questions are put into the exams that aren’t even graded and are “test pilot” questions for future exams, which you can piss away a bunch of time on for no reason at all. Naturally, you're also using relatively basic TI calculators in the exam which help you little in battle.
I have passed three of the SOA (society of actuary) exams, and wrote a fourth and bombed it in ~2005 and never wrote again - returned for a compsci degree instead. Each exam took 300-400 hours of study time. I have nothing but the utmost respect for anyone who is a designated actuary.
Don’t let that sample question in the article fool you; most the exam questions all involve extensive use of integrals, differential equations, and other voodoo I’ve long forgotten to solve problems. Some questions can take upwards of solid page of equations to solve - some are outright dirty tricks with every possible exam answer carefully chosen to be the result of making a mis-calculation somewhere. Even relatively simple discrete mathematical questions can really throw you off in the heat of an exam. Also some questions are put into the exams that aren’t even graded and are “test pilot” questions for future exams, which you can piss away a bunch of time on for no reason at all. Naturally, you're also using relatively basic TI calculators in the exam which help you little in battle.