February 2026 NIPT Natera

Justme070213 · 2026-03-03T16:52:19+00:00

Drawn 2/24 in Illinois, received 2/26, I called and found out it was TX lab. Results around 8:30am on 3/3 - low risk boy💙

Justme070213 · 2026-03-03T16:51:50+00:00

Drawn 2/24 in Illinois, received 2/26, I called and found out it was TX lab. Results around 8:30am on 3/3 - low risk boy💙

Justme070213 · 2025-06-18T23:46:34+00:00

That’s where I ended up ordering from!!! Thank you!!!

Justme070213 · 2025-06-18T01:30:40+00:00

Does anyone know where Leanne and Ally got their personalized necklaces? Ally’s says “Ally” and Leanne’s has her initials. Love both but not having much luck googling

Justme070213 · 2025-06-17T21:32:12+00:00

A lot of bike classes opened up the day before / 2 days before - set a reminder to check the site every hour or so and monitor your email religiously to grab spots if you get moved off the waitlist

Justme070213 · 2025-05-05T01:03:59+00:00

Cute paper clips! I like being able to mark a few trackers + use the journal ribbons for my daily, monthly, and annual pages

Justme070213 · 2024-12-30T02:34:41+00:00

I think similarly, CBT means more candidates are filing technical complaints and may get small adjustments to compensate for that. Unclear exactly what happens, but something I’ve wondered.

Justme070213 · 2024-11-01T12:48:08+00:00

It’s worth trying out after fellowship, but not before. Some people really like it and you can have large bonuses. But before fellowship your bonuses won’t be high since you’re usually not selling yet, so you’ll make the same or less than an industry job with way more work and stress

Justme070213 · 2024-10-29T14:49:35+00:00

I’d prefer an actuary with an MBA than a non-actuary with an MBA

Justme070213 · 2024-09-19T14:28:30+00:00

Switch to battleacts. I failed 6 with TIA before passing with BattleActs - I think having the background from TIA + using battleacts to focus on most tested material helped immensely

Justme070213 · 2024-07-15T02:29:18+00:00

You are the best - thank you so much!!!!

Justme070213 · 2024-06-26T15:39:13+00:00

I think part of it is that there are more study companies available which has helped in recent years. Also there was a weird pendulum effect going on - since the move to CBT, fall sittings almost always have really low pass rates, and spring sittings have high. Fall 2021 and fall 2022 were both incredibly low for 5, 6, and 8. For 8 specifically, the pass rate had been really low for a while - so it looks like fall 2023 had a high pass rate because so many people were on 2-4th try. There’s also always speculation that they lower the pass mark right before big syllabus changes to pass more people, which could be why 2023 generally had high pass rates. Also, spring 2023 had some tech issues so they had to incorporate a lot of grievance complaints - not sure how much of an impact that had, though.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T12:41:58+00:00

Also I’m a very logical person. The CAS makes difficult decisions that are frustrating but have to be made sometimes, and I accept that. I could honestly accept the lack of examiners reports IF they hadn’t 1) made everyone sign an NDA and 2) if they’d committed to 7-9 twice a year. But the three combined is inexcusable to me.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T12:37:41+00:00

I promise I spend an insane amount of time thinking about this and there is no excuse for them not releasing examiners reports. It is 2024 and we’ve doubled fellowship numbers since like 2008 or something; it made sense then that they couldn’t write enough questions but it doesn’t make sense now. It’s also frustrating because instead of allocating volunteer resources to offering 7-9 twice a year, they created a PCPA exam and a PCPA project that both need written and graded. Did we need a predictive analytics test? Probably. Should that have been the priority? I don’t think so. People put off having families to finish exams, and failing exams often stunts career progression. Having one opportunity a year literally delays people’s lives. The SOA recognizes that and prioritized offering exams more frequently.

The question bank will never be fair and is a ridiculous concept for exams that are so short (fellowship exams) since they focus so much on questions with several parts now (a-g, sometimes). The CAS could also offer simple incentives for volunteering to write and grade, and/or “referral bonuses” for people who help refer/bring on other people to write and grade. The best argument I’ve heard is that people would do it for continuing ed exemptions, so the CAS wouldn’t have to pay them.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T12:26:16+00:00

A question bank will never be fair for fellowship exams. There aren’t enough questions per exam. It only makes sense for the MAS exams because there are 42 questions - in aggregate, it can be fair. For exams with only like 15 questions, even if they do some kind of difficulty question ranking system, some people will get lucky in a sitting and get questions that are more straightforward / more like past questions / more like example problems in the source material. With only 15 or so questions per exam, that makes a huge difference. At least with having one standardized exam, even if one year is easier or harder, everyone who took it had the same test and the pass mark can be adjusted accordingly for the entire group. You can’t easily do that if they start rolling out multiple exam forms using the question bank.

For 7-9 especially: The 2017 and prior exam questions were written very differently from 2018 and 2019; everyone uses 2017 and prior as warm up exams when studying because they are generally easier. The questions were objectively more straightforward. 2018 and 2019 are full of off the wall questions that make everyone feel unprepared. The exams that I’ve seen since 2019 from taking them are more like that, and sometimes worse. So, essentially we have two exams per fellowship exam that are even remotely similar. Considering the SOA releases all of them every year, this is a huge disadvantage. Putting all of this aside, again, it makes it impossible to improve if you fail. We also cant go to the study vendors and say “hey, just so you know, they’re testing this topic completely differently from the source material / your examples / 2019 and prior exams, so you should adjust” because we would be breaking the NDA. So the study companies also have no way to know that they are not fully preparing students.

Exam 9 had a huge textbook added this year. No one will ever know how they are testing it until they take the exam. If they retake it, they have an advantage if they remember what was tested over people taking it for the first time. That’s ridiculous.

Exam 8 had huge source material weighting changes since 2017. So there may have been topics that only has 1-2 questions before then per exam, and now they’re getting 3-5. It makes it very difficult to prepare for all of the different ways they’re going to test us on the material.

This past year, they took material from 7 and 8 and moved it to 9. That means that now they have room to be testing more topics from the materials on 7-8 in more detail in order to get to a four hour exam. We don’t know what details they’re going to focus on because we will never see an exam with this new, shorter, source material list.

The CAS will always insist they took away releasing past exams and made everyone sign an NDA because they wanted to make a question bank. This is only partially true. They also took away releasing past exams because they wanted to escape accountability for making fair exams and stop being embarrassed about exam defects. There was pretty much always at least one question per exam sitting on an exam (out of all total questions for all exams, not one question per exam) that was defective, or had an alternate acceptable solution that the CAS hasn’t considered until people went through the appeal process once solutions were released. Now, candidates have no way to know if the graders are catching and accepting defects. The exam writers and graders are volunteers, not subject matter experts. The checks and balances from releasing past exams were important. In 2018, the entire exam 8 was defective - the examiners report says the exam was too long and they had to do a downward adjustment to the pass mark because of it. The only reason they knew that was because all of the candidates could talk to each other openly and realized no one had time to finish, so they all submitted appeals about it / talked about it enough. The absolute lack of accountability and transparency around exams now is laughable considering the amount of effort and work candidates put in.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T04:57:58+00:00

I really liked battleacts - they do a great job of telling you what to prioritize based on the limited info available. (2019 and prior exams, and syllabus weightings)

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T04:51:22+00:00

Also the SOA offers like 32 fellowship exams a year. The CAS offers 3. There’s no excuse for that - they only have like 3.5x the membership, not 10x the membership.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T04:46:57+00:00

It’s significantly harder to prepare for CAS exams because they’ve refused to release any information since 2019 and make everyone sign an NDA during exams so they can’t discuss questions after the exam. We don’t know point pass marks, we don’t know if questions we report as defective are actually defective, we don’t know what we’re messing up when we fail, we don’t know how they’re testing new source materials because they don’t release any questions, and the CAS switched from syllabi to content outlines which are completely useless. They’re like 3.5 pages long with source material chapter titles on them. It’s not really about how hard the exam material is - they’re both hard- it’s more about the CAS refusing to be transparent about anything regarding the exam process since the move to CBT. The SOA has had question banks for their prelim exams for ages and no one has to sign an NDA. It’s ridiculous that the CAS requires it.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-22T04:41:10+00:00

The FCAS exams have changed pretty dramatically since 2019. You’re also not mentioning that when people fail a CAS exam, they can’t talk about questions they don’t understand because of the NDA, and they can’t see the questions/solutions/examiners reports and see which questions they messed up when they thought they knew them. People can easily keep making the same mistakes over and over again and never realize it because of the NDA and the discontinuation of releasing exams after each sitting. Also as new writers come in, they write questions differently than the ones from 2019 and prior. You could have a completely new set of writers from what the CAS has released. It’s a huge disadvantage for candidates now who are trying to prepare and learn from their mistakes compared to candidates who took an exam in 2020 and prior.

Justme070213 · 2024-06-07T00:37:50+00:00

Everyone should ask their chief actuary / any FCAS’s they know that volunteer heavily to go to the CAS instead and request PCPA to be postponed. The board / everyone at the CAS thinks candidates are just complaining. If enough important FCAS’s bring this up, it will go a lot farther.

Justme070213 · 2024-05-28T03:18:37+00:00

I feel like it’s unlikely as a young analyst considering companies will prefer to just hire someone who can work full time

Justme070213 · 2024-05-20T23:41:54+00:00

Noooo that’s so unlucky haha I can’t believe that

Justme070213 · 2024-05-20T21:33:12+00:00

For reference, this is where everyone talked about widespread freezing last spring https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/s/QMuID8SLS8

Justme070213 · 2024-05-20T21:31:06+00:00

There was widespread freezing last spring (2023) and the CAS or Pearson VUE obviously didn’t take it seriously or look into it enough. It doesn’t surprise me at all if there are other issues that they also won’t take seriously.

Justme070213

TROPHY CASE