TITLE: Are the actuarial exams hard?
QUESTION [8 upvotes]: I heard that they are difficult. Is this true? Are they like the qualifying exams in grad school? For example, is the probability exam and the financial math exam comparable to qualifying exams (e.g. needs months and months of study)?

REPLY [3 votes]: I have passed some of the earlier actuarial exams in the U.S. system, so they are jointly administered by the Society of Actuaries (SOA) and the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS).  I have passed two qualifying exams in graduate school.  The qualifying exams were much more difficult, especially the exam I took over analysis, which is largely on Lebesgue measure and more general measures.
Now that I have gone through most of graduate school, I am very certain that studying for the actuarial exams will be easy.  What I mean is that the difficulty of math I have seen in graduate school is so much greater than the actuarial exams, that I will be able to understand everything I read, and will be able to apply it as well.
BUT, it will still take a lot of study time.  It is often said you will need to study for 150-300 hours to pass an actuarial exam.  This might go down a bit after graduate school, but you still have to read through 10-15 chapters of a textbook and learn pretty much everything in it, all the definitions and formulas and theorems.  And, then, you will want to practice as many old exam problems as you can, because they are most likely more difficult than the problems from the textbook you learned the material from.
Let me put it this way.  If you were a good math student at a top 80 grad school, and you only studied for actuarial exams for a three or four months (no other job), you could probably pass 2 or 3 or 4 exams all at once.  But, I wouldn't do more than 2 or 3 because companies don't want to pay people a lot of money when they don't have any experience.