Fortunately, actuarial exams do not expire. If you passed one several years ago, it still counts as being passed and you do not have to rewrite the exam. There isn’t a specific time frame in which you have to pass all the actuarial exams.
However, the exam curriculum does change occasionally so that may impact your exam pass credit.
Exam Conversions
When the exam curriculum changes, it means that the SOA and/or CAS have decided to add content to the syllabus, or remove it. In some cases, they just change which exam will cover certain material, or they may even add new exams.
Typically, when the syllabus changes majorly, there will be a conversion table (like this one or this one) that shows which exams under the new syllabus you’d get credit for based on which exams you’ve passed prior to the change.
Obviously, the more years that go by the more likely this is to happen and it’s possible that even 2 or 3 changes occur within that time frame.
Losing Benefit of an Exam
In some cases when the SOA and/or CAS remove exams from the requirements, the exam credit isn’t transitioned to a different exam under the new syllabus.
In this case, you’d lose any benefit you had to passing that exam since it’s no longer relevant.
Associates Will Always be Associates
Like I’ve said in other posts (like this detailed one about how actuarial exams work – see Exam Progression), there are two ‘levels’ of actuaries. The first level is called an Associate and the second level is called a Fellow. A Fellow is a fully qualified actuary.
There are several requirements that need to be met in order to become an Associate. The requirements depends on the current exam structure, but once you’ve officially become an Associate under the current exam structure that title is permanent.
So, even if changes are made to the Associate requirements, anyone that has already previously achieved Associateship won’t have to meet any additional requirements in order to keep their title.
The same is true for Fellows.
Which exam credits do you have now?
If it’s been a while and you suspect it’s possible that the exam syllabus may have changed between the time you passed your exam(s) and now, then you’ll want to know which exam credits you currently have.
Some of your passed exams may be able to give you credit for different exams now.
The best way to figure this out is to call the Society of Actuaries (SOA contact info is here) or the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS contact info is here) support directly (depending on which one you took actuarial exams with, SOA is more common). They’ll be able to look into your exam history and tell you exactly which exams you currently have credit for.
Unfortunately, there isn’t anything online (that I could find) that shows historic syllabus changes so it would be fairly cumbersome to figure this out by yourself. It’ll be better to get the information directly from one of the governing bodies.
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