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There are minor errors here and there, and I would think in the next editions they will get addressed. If you were to look past any minor things, I do believe the quality is excellent. Remember that PRMIA is an entirely volunteer driven organization. Though I am not entirely sure, the material was put together by the contributing authors for passion and not for money.
Yet PRMIA does need to create the connection between students and members and the authors so feedback can be shared, and the authors (often each chapter has a different author) can incorporate that in future editions.
To some extent you will be studying the stories about Barings and stuff like that – academic courses are always quite behind the real world. One reason for that is it takes a lot of work for any association to change its syllabus, create new material, exams; and there is always some process involved in taking board approvals, building consensus etc before they make any changes. Same applies to GARP/FRM, the syllabus is pretty much the same and changes are cosmetic. The fact though is that other than regulation not much new is being invented in risk management every day…VaR is still the same as it was in the mid-nineties, and the concepts of capital adequacy, liquidity, asset-liability matching aren’t new either. You can change risk weights, percentages, make a few changes here and there in the calculations but those are more about the mechanics than any profound conceptual or philosophical changes.
As for seminars, those are easy to organize. In fact if you look at the PRMIA event calendar they are always ahead of the game and in fact next week I will be going to listen in on big data and risk management. But what they have on the exam about data management is from about 3 or 4 years ago when people weren’t talking of big data.
They send an email – but that was the case way back in 2009 when I took the exams. Maybe that has changed, someone who took the exam recently may be able to comment. You can also write to support@prmia.org, they are generally quite responsive.
Mukul
You can download the spreadsheets from the PRMIA website using the links listed in the following Forum post. Scroll down 4 or 5 entries – you can’t miss the links. Given these are freely downloadable from PRMIA’s website, one is entitled to assume that there are no violations involved.
What you might be missing is the supplemental material for Exam 3. Some of the new material is in the public domain, some is not. You can find more details on this post:
https://riskprep.com/blog/98-changes-to-the-prm-syllabus
Hope this helps,
MukulIf you notice, the PRMIA Handbook is a collection of chapters written by different authors. Their individual styles mean that there is a great deal of variation within the Handbook, with some folks writing not as well as others. Some would explain in one page what another might have taken 20 for. A number of times new concepts are introduced without preamble, and sentences are often loosely written with the assumption that the audience is highly educated and can get the point the author is trying to make. Unfortunately a number of people who are reading the Handbook are reading such material for the first time, and many are trying to break into the field and all of this is new to them. The Handbook shows such newcomers little empathy.
But it is what it is, and what I discovered is that if you labor through it once, all the way from the beginning to the end, and then come back to it and start again, a lot of things make a lot more sense than they did the first time around. In other words, no alternative to persistence and hard work. And once you have done this, you will find yourself going back to the Handbook again, even if you work in the field.
On my part I have tried to explain a number of topics in an intuitive way on the ‘tutorials’ section, writing down exactly how I have internalized some of the concepts. Some people have found it useful.
I received information today from Andy Condurache on how you can install the new calculator on your PC and practice without having to buy it.
I have posted the instructions here:
https://riskprep.com/blog/144-the-new-ti-calculator-for-the-prm-examOverall, it appears to be a significant improvement over the Windows calculator, but there are some really minor quirks. No thousands separators, doesn’t work on Macs, and requires a nearly 80MB download and local installation on a PC which means you can’t really install it on your work computer (unless you are blessed with administrator access for some reason).
N3ls0n, modified the prior post to remove specifics, but left the topic references as I think that is fair to share.
Just a quick update: I had an email exchange with Sue Peterson at PRMIA. She confirmed that they will shortly be announcing a link to the calculator so that members can use the calculator online to become familiar with it. The members would not need to purchase the handheld calculator.
Which I think is great news. Soon as they announce the link, I will post it here though I am sure you will hear of it independently as well.
Mukul Pareek
You are right, I haven’t had the chance to update the questions in a while. I plan to put some more in over the coming months, but that may be late for your if you are looking to write the exam sometime soon.
Mukul Pareek
By the way some of the new articles are in the public domain, and others not. Here is a full list:
https://riskprep.com/blog/98-changes-to-the-prm-syllabusIndeed, the Wikipedia entry refers to the internal measurement approach, and section II.C.3.4 of the PRMIA handbook is titled the internal measurement approach.
But on a reading of the Basel framework itself, there is no reference to the internal measurement approach to be found. The Basel II document is available here in its entirety – http://www.bis.org/publ/bcbs128.pdf – and if you look at paras 645 onwards, you will see no reference to anything called the internal measurement approach.
Which is what led me to conclude that the internal measurement approach referred to by Carol Alexander was just a loose way of describing a way to measure operational risk, and was not a Basel term.
Mukul Pareek
You need to score 60% – and given that there are 24 questions in all, you need to get about 15 right. Roughly. That is because it is my guess that all questions are not equal (how else do you explain people getting, say, an 88% score on an exam with 24 questions).
Mukul Pareek
That is correct – you will not need Excel during the exam. But make sure you are well familiar with the Windows calculator. Here is an article on RiskPrep that clarifies what you must know: https://riskprep.com/blog/73-using-the-windows-calculator
