ALL 10’s Manuals in PDF Format
We welcome Luke Tomaszewski, FCAS, to the ALL 10 team. A recent Fellow of the CAS, Luke brings with him five years experience working in the reinsurance industry. As many of you may already know, CAS exams have changed over the past few years to emphasize questions that evaluate a candidate’s ability to demonstrate their understanding of the syllabus material beyond the simple regurgitation of facts and formulas. Instead candidates are expected to show their mastery through their ability to produce responses that analyze, compare, and synthesize any number of interrelated concepts from a mix of syllabus readings. Luke’s recent experience with CAS testing gives him an edge in anticipating what to expect on future exams – both the types of questions and what constitutes a high-scoring response. As a key contributor to our question development for CAS Exam 5, Luke will produce new questions using the Bloom’s Taxonomy classification that the CAS has incorporated more and more in recent years. He will also be re-working the current set of questions that are the core of our e-Review course, reformulating them with new data. This will help you test your mastery of the CAS Learning Objectives and Knowledge Statements, help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, and provide in-depth practice in the last weeks before the exam.
As Luke tells us, “For me, prior CAS questions were a very valuable tool during my studies. Unfortunately, there are a limited amount of CAS past exam questions to work through. I had not found many good CAS style practice questions in the numerous manuals I looked at. CAS style practice questions would have helped immensely in my final weeks of preparation by testing my knowledge, familiarizing myself with CAS style questions, and increasing my confidence in being able to answer questions on exam day.” He goes on to note, “Drilling these questions in the final weeks leading up to the exam is an invaluable preparatory tool and that’s the focus of e-Review. As a recent fellow, I am familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy and will use this knowledge to come up with quality exam-prep questions.” Check out one of Luke’s questions at the end of this post.
If you don’t know exactly what Bloom’s Taxonomy is and why it is an important component in the questions Luke will be developing, here’s a great description from the Future Fellows Newsletter’s December 2010 issue:
There are six levels in the taxonomy, moving through the lowest order processes to the highest:
- Knowledge—Exhibit memory of previously learned materials by recalling facts, terms, basic concepts, and answers.
- Comprehension—Demonstrative understanding of facts and ideas by organizing, comparing, translating, interpreting, giving descriptions, and stating main ideas.
- Application—Using new knowledge. Solve problems to new situations by applying acquired knowledge, facts, techniques, and rules in a different way.
- Analysis—Examine and break information into parts by identifying motives or causes. Make inferences and find evidence to support generalizations.
- Synthesis—Compile information together in a different way by combining elements in a new pattern or proposing alternative solutions.
- Evaluation—Present and defend opinions by making judgments about information, validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria
With Luke’s new questions – both traditional and Bloom’s based – using ALL 10’s e-Review study system component will help you to increase your understanding of the key concepts in the syllabus readings, provide you with many challenging questions for problem-solving practice, and show you how to synthesize knowledge and techniques to give comprehensive answers when a more complex level of understanding is being tested.
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