Welcome

This is your course website where you will find important announcements, course slides, lecture notes, assignments, exercises, and everything else about the course. Annotated lectures will also be downloadable from this site. Please visit this site from time to time.

About this course

This course, together with STT 456, is largely intended to prepare you for the SOA Exam MLC (Models for Life Contingencies). These two courses will cover the new learning objectives of Exam MLC that took effect on the Spring 2012 exam. STT 455 essentially covers the first half of these revised learning objectives. The other half of the materials will be covered in STT 456 in the Spring semester. To prepare you for applying life contingent concepts in the workplace and for more advanced studies in actuarial science, it is possible that more mathematical rigor and additional materials may be taught in the classroom than would be required in the SOA exam.

The SOA announced recently that, effective Spring 2014, MLC will have both multiple-choice and written-answer questions. Here for details.

In general terms, while there are possible differences in terminologies and notations or symbols from either previous syllabus or from other existing review materials, we will try to adopt, as best we can, to those that are expected to be used in the exam. However, we will note some of these differences as we proceed through the materials during the semester. Topics to be covered in this course include: survival distributions, life tables, life insurance, life annuities and benefit premiums.

You are highly encouraged to visit the SOA Exam MLC website for recent updates on the exam syllabus, including updates to sample exam questions.

Special announcements

Any special announcements and reminders for the course will be posted here. Please visit this site as often as you can.
December 1 - Reminder that our final exam is scheduled for: Tuesday, December 9, 2014, 5:45pm-7:45pm.
December 1 - Sample finals are posted in the Past Exams page.
November 21 - Your Homework 2 has been posted on the Assignments page. Remember the due date is Friday, December 5, 2014.
November 13 - Reminder that Class Test 2 is scheduled for Monday, November 17. Please bring calculators and your own copy of the Illustrative Life Table.
November 10 - Review session, Thursday, November 13, 3-5 pm at Room C-304 Wells Hall.
November 10 - Reminder that Class Test 2 has been moved to Monday, November 17.
October 22 - Solutions to Class Test 1 have been posted.
September 10 - Your Homework 1 has been posted on the Assignments page. Remember the due date is Friday, September 19, 2014.
October 6 - Class Test 1 has been postponed to Monday, October 20, 2014. I have posted sample tests and also recommended exercises from the book.
October 8 - The topics for Class Test 1 will be everything from start till page 33 of the annotated slides for Weeks 6 to 8.

Additional resources

* Emil does not endorse any of the commercial study manuals. They are here for your easy reference/information.