Pass P5 (Finance) exam - Institute of Actuaries

I passed this paper on my first sitting despite problems and delays

I can’t really believe it and am happy I’ve proved that I know my stuff (and get a pay rise).

Let’s hope I can pass the last few in a fairly short time.

OK so I sat the exam on Friday. It’s the only online course that the Institute of Actuaries runs and there were problems right from the start.

My first problem was that my unique access code had already been used by someone else so with just over an hour to go I had to stop my last minute preparations and make phone calls to get a new code. This was very disrupting.

My second problem was that just after I got my new code the server in the US went down. This was 10am in the UK so was the middle of the night where the server was. We were then getting updates saying that it was going to be up and running again in 30-60 mins until 2pm. This was ridiculous as we were sitting around waiting and waiting. Once we hit 2pm it was work time in the US so things started to get moving (despite being told before that people were working on it) and we were told that it would be between 2 and 9 hours to fix. Great.

We decided to abandon the exam and go back to our desks. I was feeling strange – underwhelmed mainly as it was a big anticlimax and I had no closure and still had an exam to face the next week. I was looking forward to a weekend without study and an exam hanging over me but it wasn’t looking like it was going to happen.

90 mins later the server was up and running again so after some debate we all decided to go ahead and traipsed back into the room and got on with it.

It felt great afterwards and I hope that the 6 1/2 hours of faffing about before getting new codes and waiting for the server to go online hasn’t affected my performance. I find out the result fairly soon.

It’s not the normal Institute of Actuaries format of lots of long questions written longhand but is an online multiple choice paper which is more difficult than it sounds as there’s no easy answers.

Back to the study.