ETC3430: Financial mathematics under uncertainty

- 20% each (40%) - Being someone who prefers doing assignments to class tests, I wasn't a fan of this format. The tests were held in weeks 5 and 12, and each took 1hr. Both tests consisted of 6 multiple choice questions that were each worth 2 marks and either 2 or 3 short-answer questions for the remaining 8 marks to total 20 marks. The tests were not excessively difficult, as they were taken straight from the tutorial questions usually with a few minor adjustments to throw people off a little. However, because they were held so close to the prior tutorial which was the day before, that covered a lot of concepts, it was really difficult to be properly prepared for them. The average for test 1 was around 15/20 and for test 2 was around 14/20, which highlighted that most students did find it reasonably challenging, despite the averages being in the 70 range. Overall, if you prepare

Not too bad of a subject I guess. Thanasi and Pengjie (the only tutor for the subject this semester) were both incredibly friendly and willing to help explain difficult concepts in the tutorials. However, the exam was quite long and most students would have been pressed for time to finish it.

- 60%. I found the exam to be a bit too long to complete in the 2hr timeframe. It covered all material covered in the remaining 9 lectures (as 1 was lost due to the Grand Final Eve Holiday), but heavily emphasised on a lot of proofs that were not taught fully. Therefore, to do well on this you had to excessively rote-learn the proofs from the slides. As the exam was on the first day of the exam period, this was not that easy to do. Consequently, this was reflected in my mark, due to questions being left blank or just answered weirdly due to me not being able to memorise enough proofs in an early enough timeframe.

Athanasios (Thanasi) Pantelous - Really great guy. Thanasi is incredibly friendly and passionate about actuarial science, particularly in the area of quantitative finance, so loves to teach students about the course. Despite this, Thanasi is still a little lost on the content, which is why I guess from 2020 onwards he isn't taking the subject. Despite this, I found his lectures very captivating and far more straightforward to understand due to his ability to be really engaging in conversations that were/weren't related to the course itself.

Yes, 2018 Semester 2 Exam was provided with solutions

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

Actuarial Mathematics for Life contingent Risks is recommended but barely covers any of the content in the course. Don't get it.
Instead, try and get either the

- The tutorials were 1.5 hrs long and held in the LTB tutorial rooms as is standard these days. Since only 35 students took the course right through this semester, there were only 2 tutes allocated for the subject. Due to this, there was far more opportunity to interact with Pengjie and understand the content as much as possible. Tutorials were very standard, just going over the tutorial questions posted on Moodle after every lecture + giving insights into what the tests would be like.
Overall, despite not doing as well as I would've liked in this subject, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Thanasi and Pengjie were a great teaching combo and were very well-versed in the material having taught it the year before. It's a shame that from 2020 onwards, ETC3430 will only be offered in semester 1, and I expect that a different lecturer will be taking the subject with a completely different assessment structure and content structure.

1 x 2hr lecture per week
1 x 1.5hr tutorial per week

Semester 2, 2019