Description: 1994 SOA Spring Meeting, San Francisco. In this session the panelists led the audience through case studies that required the development of various difficult assumptions where experience is limited. The panel discussed the key issues and how they would go about developing each assumption.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, Boston. This session discussion is about new dimensions of pricing and risk selection for direct-response insurance products. Topics discussed: 1. Multiple dimensional set of assumptions relating response rates. 2. Expected claims. 3. Projected persistency. 4. Customer buying propensities.

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: Join this interactive session and increase your creative confidence. Design pros from University of Toronto Rotman School of Management will discuss how to use design thinking to solve problems big and small. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves and do some hands-on exercises to help unlock your innovative thinking. Who knows what creative solutions we might come up with! This session will be of interest to actuaries of all experience levels and disciplines. Don't we all have problems to solve?