Hello Graduate Students in Actuarial Science,
We wanted to clarify a couple of items related to the course curriculum:
ASRM 451 v.s. ASRM 499 Section GR
We have had some requests from students to enroll in ASRM 451 – Basics of Statistical Learning. This course is cross listed as Stat 432 in the Department of Statistics. Students in ASRM attempting to register for this course have been restricted with the flag “Course Closed”. Since the course belongs to the Department of Statistics, priority will be given to Statistics students and will require an approval to allow ASRM students to enroll in this class.
We are recommending that ASRM students in the MS program enroll in ASRM 499, Section GR rather than ASRM 451, for the following reasons:
- This course is designed for ASRM students and there will not be any restriction from registering for ASRM students
- This course will adequately prepare students for Exam MASII/SRM
University-Earned Credit (UEC) Program
There continues to be questions and inquiries from the students regarding the pending participation in the University-Earned Credit (UEC) program from the SOA. We wanted to confirm at this time where we are in this process, and what it means for the students as they navigate through their courses and potentially plan for the implementation of this program.
At the present time, the SOA has not issued any waiver for exams. An application has been submitted to the SOA for the pending UEC program, whereby several exams may be eligible for exemption based on the listed qualifying criteria. We are expecting a response to our application in the Spring, including which courses in our curriculum could be eligible for SOA course exemption.
The response from the SOA will also clarify how the UEC program will be administered. At the present time, any ASRM courses taken this term or in the Spring 2022 term will still require the student to complete the corresponding SOA exam. Students may consider restructuring their course selection in consideration of the impact of UEC accreditation, however, the earliest that a student could obtain UEC credit would be Fall 2022. We cannot make a guarantee on this timetable until we receive a response from the SOA on our application, including which courses would be eligible for the program, and what changes we will need to make to the curriculum and course delivery to be compliant with the criteria.
We have no further information at this point, but we will do our best to share any news with the students as it comes in. If you are interested in detailed information on the UEC program, please refer to the link below from the SOA webpage.