It was very useful to learn and understand mathematical concepts

that pop up in actuarial frequently and gave me a better

understanding of my other units through this. However the unit

itself seemed a little unfair when it came to marking and overly

tricky at times.

The lectures were very engaging as the lecturer was passionate

and interesting. There were plenty of examples meaning that the

lectures didn't cover too much content or go to quickly. You need

to go to the lectures to understand the content and see the

examples explained.

The tutorials didn't have time to cover all the questions and the

some concepts were hard for the tutors to explain well due to the

limited time frame. There were no marks for going to tutorials so

it's only neccesary if further explanation of the solution is

required. The tutorial solutions were uploaded at the end of each

week and were much more time effective if taken the time to go

through the questions.

The group assessments were very tricky, almost unfairly so. They

used concepts covered in class but in ways that we had never

seen before. It is definitely down to luck based on who you get put

in a group with. Luckily my group was very hard working so we did

pretty well, but it was still a big challenge and many groups

struggled doing these assignments. I spent days on single

questions just going in circles since the answers were unclear and

there was no guidance for them. This made the unit very time

consuming.

The exam was mostly good (although based on general consensus

must have been marked very harshly despite how easy it was).

The exam only had one or two very difficult questions, but the rest

were straight forward with no tricks at all. It was also easy enough

to finish in the allotted time, making it overall a fair examination

(although again, marking shows a somewhat different story so

beware of that). There was a practice exam that only part of the

solutions were uploaded for. The final exam was somewhat

similar to this, especially in terms of general content and

structure.

Focus on the extra questions that are given below the regular

tutorial questions. These mimic the assignments more and if you

are able to get help on understanding these you should have a

better basis for the assignments. As for the exam, just practice the

regular questions to get efficient at doing these more straight

forward questions so you can really make the most of your time in

the exam.