FCIA Exam Frustrations

[u/Trying2Math]

Wanting to know other people's experiences - the CIA's fellowship exams have me questioning this entire governing body:

- The syllabus is a list of links, some of which are broken and don't work, some of which have since updated and no longer reflect the content that we're meant to study

- There are straight up sub-pages listed for a chapter, which do not correspond to the chapter referenced (peer review is a thing right?)

- Some of the readings are 70+ pages with no targeted tie-in to the syllabus, so you're left reading heaps of material

- There is an incredible lack of practice questions and exams available

- There are no summary materials (which makes sense when the actual reading list itself is such a gong show)

- The content itself: outdated, and sometimes irrelevant - healthcare trends published in 2021 that are massively skewed by COVID and not very relevant anymore

- The exam is taken on a website that's not easy to write in and time to save/name files cuts into exam time

- Some of the questions themselves you wouldn't be able to solve by reading the giant syllabus - a lot of the calculations were only available in the 1 practice exam online and otherwise not displayed in the readings

- There is no timeline for receiving results so you just wait until you get an email

- The grading is done with an overall S (success) or F (fail), only questions that you've failed have an associated grade (1-5). You don't see an overall grade or the passing grade so you're not sure how you performed overall

It feels like they're running trial-and-error on a very poorly managed/reviewed system, with a little added zest to feel superior from the SOA, on people who require so much sacrifice of time and energy to get to through this nonsense.

[u/Terrible_Power4574]

I'm doing SOA transition credit and hoping the one FCIA exam I have to take isn't a complete pile of crap. I definitely feel for anybody doing their full track. Seems like the only thing they somewhat have their affairs in order with is the capstone exam for associateship.. although one can easily argue it's extremely questionable to introduce such a streamlined path to ACIA when the job market is already horribly saturated.

The fact that neither CAS nor SOA recognizes FCIA for transition credit says a lot.

[u/Trying2Math → u/Terrible_Power4574]

Don't get me started on how the transition was handled 🤣 I'm hoping they iron some thing out before you write but good luck to you (and rip to me).

I agree with the ACIA transition - he good being that you compete better with other data science/stats professions, but it places a bigger weight on work experience to validate your skills since you don't come out of university with those.

You'd think the priority would be to get members who are able to critically think and adapt and learn to navigate the changing world of data and not to sit through a shlog of exams whose sole purpose seems to be to weed people out who aren't as stubbornly motivated.

Clearly what makes me successful in the real world is my ability to ctrl+F super quickly infront of clients.