ETC3530 / ETC5353 Contingencies in Insurance and Pensions (Sem 2, 2021)
Difficulty:
Year Completed: Semester 2, 2021
Prerequisite: ETC2430
Exemption:
CM1 Actuarial Mathematics
ETC1000 (10%), ETC2430 (35%), ETC3530 (55%)
Weighted average of 70% required. Minimum of 60% required for each unit.
Mean Setu Score: 74.0%
Clarity of Learning Outcomes: 86.2%
Clarity of Assessments: 72.4%
Feedback: 75.9%
Resources: 62.1%
Engagement: 79.3%
Satisfaction: 67.9%
Subject Content:
Lecture(s) and Tutorial(s):
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Assessments:
This course covers a wide range of basic insurance & superannuation policy structures. The first part of the unit examines how to value various life annuity and assurance policies. How premiums and reserves are calculated are also covered here. Joint policies, mortality profits and competing forces of decrement are also considered. The final section of the unit looks at unit-linked & AWP contracts and how profit testing measures are used.
1 x 2 hour lecture
1 x 1.5 hour tutorial
N/A
Online Quizzes 10%
Tutorial Presentation 10%
Dashboard Assignment 30%
Final Exam 50%
Comments
The unit covered a wide range of interesting content in the insurance & pension products sphere. The content is very heavy equations focused but also brought in elements of industry knowledge. ETC3530 also further expands upon topics learnt in ETC2430.
The lectures gave an engaging spin on a unit which is otherwise mostly formulaic. Rather than being a seminar style the lecturer would be quite interactive with the audience, meaning that there was a real benefit to attending live. The content was chunked in a structured manner whilst being understandable.
Complete lecture slides were released weekly and contained all the content covered in the lectures & needed for assessments.
Tutorial presentations ran across the semester and took up the first segment of most tutorials. The tutorial presentations covered a set question from the week's question sheet and an industry topic. The tutor then solved a selection of the remainder of the set questions from the previous week’s lecture topic. Unfortunately, as with many ETC tutorials it's often one way and lacks a collaborative element except for with the presentation (with 1 other student for 1 tutorial).
The sole individual assignment was a GUI dashboard coded in R-Shiny aimed to display premiums and reserve evolution for a range of different life products. It covered most product types up until and including joint life policies.
If you haven’t encountered much R before, this teaches you good programming skills. It also teaches how to rig up reactive front-end design tools such as Shiny with back-end computation.
A recommendation to get started on this one early, debugging your code can take longer than it takes to write.
Weekly quizzes were quick & relatively straightforward. They assessed applying the content from the previous week's lecture.
The exam was quite challenging and was quite pressured for time.
Students should aim to work fast and practice of the tutorial
questions under time pressures will definitely help for the exam.
Get started early on the assignment. Also keeping a log of the equations either in a formula sheet or program is worthwhile for easy reference. Making yourself comfortable with the math in this unit (basic sequences & series, probability & calculus) is vital both for the in-semester assessments & the exam.
General Overview:
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Concluding Remarks