Nobody posts their fail slips on LinkedIn.
You see the celebration posts, the “thrilled to announce” ones, and you start to believe everyone else is passing on the first sitting. They are not. The pass rates are public: for most preliminary exams, roughly half the room walks out without a pass. Statistically, the fail is the normal outcome. We just don’t talk about it.
So let me talk about it.
The day the result came
I remember refreshing the page and seeing the number. Not a 6. Not even close enough to argue with. My first thought wasn’t about the exam. It was about the money. Exam fees are real money where I come from. My second thought was about the people back home who were praying for me. Failing felt like failing them.
I gave myself one evening to feel terrible about it. One. Then I opened the diagnostic report.
What the diagnostic actually told me
Here is the part most people skip: the fail slip is data, and we are supposed to be good with data.
Mine showed I was fine on the mechanics. Integration, standard distributions, the formula work. Where I bled points was multi-step word problems under time pressure. I wasn’t failing probability. I was failing reading speed under stress, which is a completely different problem with a completely different fix.
So the retake plan wasn’t “study more.” It was:
- Timed sets only. No more untimed practice past the halfway point of prep. Every session mirrored exam conditions.
- A wrong-answer journal. Every miss got one line: what the question wanted, what I did instead. Patterns showed up within two weeks.
- Earned difficulty. I didn’t touch the hardest problems until my accuracy on medium ones crossed 85%. Confidence is built, not willed.
Three months later I passed, not narrowly.
What I’d tell you if we were on a call
If you just failed: you did not lose your future. You lost one sitting. The credential doesn’t record how many attempts anything took, and no employer has ever asked me.
If exam fees are the thing keeping you from the retake, don’t quietly give up, the CAS/SOA Actuarial Exam Support Program exists for exactly this, and it’s one of the first things I point mentees to.
And if you need to hear it from someone with letters after his name: I failed on this road, and the road kept going.
Ubuntu: I am because we are. If this helped, it’s because someone once helped me.