Description: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in Las Vegas, NV May 22-24, 2000 This session discussed the purpose of the proposed Ambassador Program under development by the Actuary of the Future Section to focus on the nontraditional actuarial practice areas that are expected to play an increasingly significant role within the actuarial profession in the 21st century.

Description: It has been a year since the SOA implement major changes to the ASA curriculum. This session will provide an update on the changes and in particular focus on what we have seen as schools update their VEE and UCAP/CAE submissions.

Description: This session discussion was about the North America Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States: Expectations, status, opportunities and implications with respect to professional mobility, financial institution reform, social security systems, and employee benefit plans.

Description: From a session at a meeting of the Society of Actuaries held in Las Vegas, NV May 22-24, 2000 The American Academy of Actuaries had put together an ad hoc task force charged with developing a long-term strategic approach for marketing the profession to future users of actuarial services and to strategically position and strengthen the profession. This session provided an update on the progress of the task force.

Description: A flipped classroom moves the traditional lecture component of teaching outside of normal classroom time, so that lectures can be replaced with active learning activities during class time. In this talk, I first present a brief overview of flipped classrooms, with strategies for implementation and resources provided. Second, I will discuss the details of its application replacing two lectures in my third-year Life Contingencies course. Students’ responses to the technique are also provided in the form of data from anonymous post-activity surveys.

Description: This section consists of the following reports, Activities of the Subcommittee on Variable Contracts of the ALC-LIAA Actuarial Committee, Alternate Routes, and Recent Mortality under Individual Immediate Annuities. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1969, Vol. 21, Pt. 2, No. 61.

Description: This session discussion is about employer mandates, state regulations [retirement communities & HMOs, NAIC rate regulation exposure draft ], relations with regulators and relations with health care providers. From Record of the Society of Actuaries Vol. 15, No. 3A.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: This is the presidential address by former President of the Society of Actuaries, Malvin E. Davis. His topic was the current position of the American United States and Canadian life insurance actuary, the problems that face him and the Society of Actuaries, and what the Society should do to address those problems.

Description: The panel discussed actuarial opportunities in the 1980's and 1990's. Questions discussed included: 1. Will traditional opportunities be reduced? 2. What nontraditional opportunities are available? 3. What changes are needed in our educational process? 4. How do we make nontraditional employers aware of actuarial skills and their value? 5. What will actuarial work be like? From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 8, No. 3.