I will see if I can organize these responses later, but here’s the first regular Board candidate I have answers from.
Roger Loomis:
Thanks Mary Pat.
My answers to your questions are below. You have my permission to share them.
What do you think about the UEC program?
If a college wants to have courses that prepare students to pass actuarial exams that is great. But we already have a system for testing whether somebody has mastered the content on an actuarial exam’s syllabus: the actuarial exam itself. Because of that, I don’t understand the need for giving students credit for SOA exams without passing them.
What do you think about the exam system changes recently announced?
I think the SOA has made an excellent case for modernizing the exam system. The trends they’ve identified (e.g. the rise of data science, the impact of artificial intelligence on the nature of work, the declining market value of basic cognitive skills) are real, and if the profession is going to maintain and enhance its value, we need an educational system that will support actuaries carving out a valuable niche in the emerging economy.
More specifically, I don’t believe SOA exams can or should educate candidates to become data scientists. However, actuaries should be capable of analyzing data using modern statistical techniques. Moreover, we should have a functional understanding of what data scientists do so that we can effectively collaborate with them. Ultimately, the unique skills that actuaries bring to the table will involve deeper domain knowledge in insurance, managing insurance risk, and financial risk modeling.
From my perspective, replacing an ASA-level course on Investments and Financial Markets with an exam on Advanced Topics in Predictive Analytics is a good tradeoff. That one course won’t help actuaries competing with trained data scientists for a data scientist job, but it just might increase the chances that the actuary will know enough about data science to be the data scientist’s manager in five years.
Just an FYI: Roger reached out to me, which is what kicked me off asking these two questions. (I had planned on asking these questions, but just hadn’t started asking yet)
I have emailed the three President-Elect candidates already, and will be emailing the other Board candidates I can get contact email addresses for. I share answers only with permission.