ACTL1101: Introduction to Actuarial Studies

An open-book weekly quiz served free marks, but people seemed to get anxious all the time so this may be abolished. Other than that, a mid-sem and an assignment is included. Finals are weighted only 40% - this will not happen for second year ACTL courses and onwards.

MATH1151 is a prerequisite for this course. It is expected that you are good at handling matrices, integration and especially probability and statistics.

There is a wide variety of things taught in this course. Being a legend among actuaries, Benjamin has taken action to reduce the content, but this course is inevitably going to be a bit over the place. The course is definitely introductory - whilst mathematics is definitely involved, it isn't outrageous yet and most calculations are kept to a reasonable difficulty. Can be a bit painful to study due to this nature of being over the place. The direct consequence of this is that there are heaps of methods that you need to remember.

The introduction of the R tutorials add one extra annoying contact hour, but pays off. Any actuary will need some skill in computing to stand out in modern society, and this is one way to get it going.

(I have to break a guideline and talk about the lecturer here: If you ask many people in my cohort they may evoke hatred for Benjamin. But if you ask ANYONE else, they'll say he is the best, which I believe.)

(This course does NOT contribute to obtaining Part I exemptions. Note that CT2 is fulfilled by ACCT1501, ACCT1511 and FINS1613, and CT7 is fulfilled by ECON1101 and ECON1102. You may only commence fulfilling other CTs in second year. For reference, CT stands for 'Core Technical'.)

2 hours of Lecture, 1 hour of Tutorial on lecture topics, 1 hour of Tutorial on R software

4/5

Yes

Benjamin Avanzi

A bunch of past papers were posted on Moodle; some more can generally be found by asking actuarial students in older years (ASOC is a tight bunch).

3/5

Sherris, Principles of Actuarial Science - Good if you make good use of it. But because it is so old and has no formatting whatsoever, it was too painful for me to read and I gave up after a while.

2016/2

87 HD