Exam ASTAM is the advanced short-term actuarial mathematics exam for candidates focused on property-casualty, short-term health, and general insurance. Follows Exam FAM. Upload your ACTEX digital edition, scanned ASM manual, or your own ASTAM notes and exclam.ai turns them into a fully guided study plan with adaptive flashcards, quizzes, and a weekly schedule.
Multiple-choice and written-answer format. Candidates must show work on multi-step problems including reserving triangles and ratemaking calculations.
Written-answer questions including loss reserving triangles and ratemaking calculations.
Heavy on loss reserving methods and credibility theory.
Prerequisite: Exam FAM must be completed first.
The advanced short-term counterpart to ALTAM.
Format details change periodically. Always verify the current exam structure on soa.org before your exam.
The 5 topic areas tested on Exam ASTAM, with approximate weight bands from the public SOA syllabus. Click any topic for a dedicated study page.
Advanced severity, frequency, and aggregate loss models including tail fitting, censoring, and truncation.
Classical limited fluctuation credibility, Buhlmann and Buhlmann-Straub models, and Bayesian credibility.
Loss ratio and pure premium methods, trend and development, expense provisions, and classification ratemaking.
Loss development and reserving methods including chain ladder, Bornhuetter-Ferguson, Cape Cod, and frequency-severity approaches.
Reinsurance structures including proportional and non-proportional treaties, and pricing reinsurance programs.
Topic names and approximate weight bands sourced from the public SOA Exam ASTAM syllabus on soa.org.
Drop in your ACTEX Exam ASTAM digital edition (full-corpus PDF), scanned ASM pages, TIA handouts, or your own notes. exclam.ai parses them into structured content for a fully guided study plan.
AI generates flashcards for formulas and concepts, plus multiple-choice quizzes targeting each of the 5 topic areas. Edit any card.
Coverage phase, review phase, and mocks — distributed across your ~18-week timeline or whatever you choose.
Pick the timeline that matches your exam date. Each plan covers roughly 300 hours distributed across a different number of weeks.
exclam.ai works alongside any of these vendors. Upload paths vary — ACTEX sells full digital editions as downloadable PDFs (cleanest upload), ASM print manuals can be scanned for the full corpus, and The Infinite Actuary provides downloadable PDF handouts alongside their videos. For ASM digital (app-locked) and Coaching Actuaries (online platform), upload your own notes taken while studying. We do not distribute or reproduce any vendor content — your manual stays with the publisher.
ASTAM focuses on short-term products — property/casualty, health, and general insurance. Heavy on loss modeling, ratemaking, and reserving. ALTAM focuses on long-term products — life insurance, annuities, pensions. Heavy on mortality, profit testing, and embedded value.
Fluent with distributions (severity, frequency, aggregate), credibility formulas, and loss development triangles. The math is applied rather than theoretical but there is a lot of it.
Opinions vary. Candidates with P&C backgrounds find ASTAM more intuitive. Candidates from life/annuity backgrounds find ALTAM more intuitive. Pass rates are similar.
Upload your ACTEX digital edition, scanned ASM pages, TIA handouts, or your own notes — exclam.ai builds a fully guided study plan around your exam date.