In 2024 I took Exam 6 twice. On the first attempt I used TIA to study. I failed that attempt and on the second attempt I decided to get BattleActs for a different treatment of the material¹. On the second attempt I passed. As a result I am in a somewhat unique position to compare the merits of each of them.

Disclaimers

Because I used BattleActs on the second attempt I was already familiar with the material to some extent. Therefore it was much easier to learn than if I had used them from the beginning. This will naturally bias me towards BattleActs. Additionally I passed on the second attempt which will, to some extent, unfairly bias me towards BattleActs. I have tried to be objective, and look for evidence to back up my claims, but bias is likely still present.

Due to some shenanigans that happened in Spring 2024 there was a shorter study period for Fall (Roughly 1.5-2 months shorter than normal). This means I spent less time on the material than I normally would. It is unclear how this effect my opinion but it is a confounder.

This is about Exam 6 specifically. My recommendation does not apply to any other exam. Also this review is as of the date of publication. They may have changed things since then.

In the unlikely event that someone from either TIA or BattleActs reads this and would like to comment feel free to send me an email and I will add a note with any comments you want to add within reason.

TIA

Important points

I have used TIA for most of the exams I have taken so far (P, FM, IFM, Mas-2, 5, and 6), so I am fairly familiar with their services. They for exams 5 and 6 they provided you with the following materials:

• A PDF summarizing the material
• A series of videos explaining the material in a lecture format
• Excel versions of past exams with questions and answers updated to match the current syllabus
• A few practice exams they wrote themselves
• Flash cards
• A discussion forum where they will answer questions

The update to the past exams was very helpful for Exam 6 which changes a lot from year to year. For example, the RBC formula has changed since they stopped past releasing exams in 2019 and just seeing the update in the example answers was helpful. Additionally, they noted if there was a mistake in a question like in Spring 2018 #18, and how you were expected to solve it then. This is a real value add over the examiners reports.

The PDF they provide is a good summary of the material. It contains basically everything from the source reading that is testable in a much more compact format. For exam 5, I almost exclusively used this PDF to learn the material and it worked like a charm. They also try to organize the topics in logical order, not just by source reading, which can help for getting the full narrative.

The videos are also good if you are low on energy and want to watch something. However I don't think they are as good as the PDF provided. The videos are not particularly well produced, and I didn't feel like it was worth the time to watch them over reading the PDF. For example, the audio was very low quality, and unpleasant to listen to. I would recommend improving the video quality a lot because videos have to potential to be entertaining to watch, which would be a big advantage to them if they could work it out.

Unimportant points

Another point against them is they recommend a study schedule which seems bad to me. There is a long time spent on "learning the material" then a shorter period on doing practice. This seems to contradict what I have read on effective study methods². This is a minor point because you can just ignore their recommended study schedule.

The final point against them is that their website was really kludgey. Content would fail to load and I would have to refresh a few times sometimes. They heavily used JavaScript and don't officially support Firefox which might be part of it.

BattleActs

Important points

I have only used BattleActs for Exam 6 so I have less perspective on them than TIA. The provided the following materials:

• Articles summarizing each reading
• Excel versions of past exams
• Practice problems they wrote themselves
• A system for practicing the past exam questions and their practice problems (they call these Battle Cards)
• Two practice exams
• A discussion forum where they answer questions

The articles they write take a much more casual tone than TIA. They contain a lot of small stories and little jokes that are similar to a mid 2010s blog style. For example, the following is a quote from their RBC article:

On Alice's first day of work as an actuarial intern, her mean boss dumped a stack of financial statements on her desk and told her to find out whether the company was healthy. But before she could ask him anything, he was already down the hall issuing orders to someone else. "What have I gotten myself into?" she thought. Poor Alice had no idea what to do. Fortunately the intern in the next cubicle overheard and peeked over the cubicle wall.

"Just calculate the RBC ratio," her new friend said. "It's all in Odomirok. The boss likes to haze interns on their first day, but I can help you. We'll tackle it together."

None of this is necessary to know, but in my opinion it made the material more approachable and less dry. They would also refer to taking the exam as "Slaying the beast" which I found motivating. This is a matter of preference however. Also throughout their articles they try to have a lot of memory tricks. For example, to remember the responsibilities of the FIO they suggested remembering it with AMERica (Analyze and report industry data, Monitor systemic risks in the insurance industry, Ensure insurance accessibility for underserved communities, Represent the U.S. in international insurance matters). Also throughout the article they have mini "Battle Quizzes" which have a few questions to answer to check if you remember things. Based on my knowledge of effective study methods² this leads to a highly effective study strategy.

Another point is how they organize the readings. They rank them in order of how many points they believe each will be on the test, and color them based on logical relationship. They also have guidelines on how long you should spend on each one, which I feel you can ignore.

One thing you might notice is there are a lot of readings they effectively recommend skipping. They believe they are not very testable or have not come up in the past. This attitude carries over into their articles. They contain less information than the TIA pdf. The idea seems to be to make studying as efficient as possible by boiling it down to the essentials. This is obviously somewhat risky if there an exam with a lot of questions on less tested material.

The practice question system the have gives you a score on each question. If you get it right the first time it is worth 6 points and on recalling it later it will be 10. The score decreases over time since the last review. This tries to show how likely you are to remember it. They also have a score out of 100%, and a leader board. This is good, but I think it ultimately looses out to putting the questions they have into Anki.

Unimportant points

Their website is pretty nice. They just use MediaWiki for their articles. This is good because MediaWiki is well tested and works flawlessly. They were not perfect though. In their practice questions you can shuffle them, but if there was too many of them this would cause it to crash and I couldn't log in again for a little bit.

They also have a 27 page cheat sheet of the most important information which I sometimes looked at on the train, and which I looked over a few minutes before the exam. This was a good resource, but the fact that it exists probably had a relatively small effect.

Stuff they could both do better

One thing the TIA had on early exams (P, IFM, and FM) was a menu with all the questions and a progress bar. Grinding through these questions was kind of fun in a way because I could watch the score increase. BattleActs kind of has this with their Battle Cards, but it isn't as good. The only thing Duolingo does good is making their app fun. So if a similar interface was there for studying past exam questions that would be a big plus.

Which one do I recommend?

For Exam 6 I am going to recommend BattleActs over TIA. In my opinion TIA gives you a set of very high quality materials you can study with, but doesn't help you with study strategy. The quality of the material is lower for BattleActs, but they have a lot of material on study strategy (how to weight each reading, pneumonics etc.). BattleActs also seems very focused on memorization. They might be different for other exams, but that seems to be how it is here.

For an exam like Exam 5 you can use logic to understand a lot of the material, and the material is short enough that you can work your way through it then form your own strategy based on what is on the past exams. However, for Exam 6 most of the material boils down to memorization so the ability to do that efficiently matters more than the quality of any given piece of material. Also there is much more testable material that has not showed up on past exams for 6 so the strategy you would form on your own would likely be flawed. There is some risk with this, it would be better if you gained as much of an understanding with all the material as possible, but I feel for most people on Exam 6 that is not a feasible recommendation.

So for Exam 6 I recommend you go with BattleActs.