Has anyone taken the PRM Exam II (Mathematical Foundations) recently? What kind of prep materials did you use? I went through the PRM Handbook and took a diagnostic test (Kesdee). The test had questions outside of the handbook. Not difficult questions, but you wouldn’t be able to answer them unless you reviewed other math textbooks. I haven’t looked at them in years and depended solely on the handbook. Any recommendations on prep materials would be appreciated!
Schaum’s books may be a good refresher. The PRM handbook assumes you have a good understanding of the math involved (lin. algebra, calculus and probability/statistics, from what I remember) and does basically a quick overview, focusing on the financial applications. Schaum’s has good refresher books on all three.
Are you a PRM? How many hours of studying did it take you? Just curious…
The number of hours would depend on the starting point.
how long did it take you?
Not long, I only read through the book quickly. I knew all the material in there.
FourCastles, Thanks for the response. The Schaum series books on calculus, prob and stats look like good refreshers. Checked them on Amazon. Did you use any other book for numerical techniques? The coverage in the handbook is pretty short.
The handbook does not cover any numerical methods other than listing them (potentially other than Newton/Raphson, I don’t remember exactly). The test will not require you to know any more, I am sure. If you want to go further because, say, you are getting into writing the software implementing numerical solutions, again, there is a good Schaum’s book on numerical methods, or you can use the old student’s standby: Numerical Recipes by Preiss (skip the implementation parts, only read the introductions to chapters with the explanations of the numerical methods). These two will give you significantly more than you will ever need for PRMIA exams and will get you started into the real thing.
I took PRM exam 2 6 months ago. It was very easy stuff. I didn’t try kesdee but handbook was sufficient. I remember 4 qns actually - two were on gamma delta neutrality, one was on Uniform prob distribution’s variance and one on maxima of a quadratic function. All were sitters if u know the formulae