GIC Re Assistant Manager common mistakes
GIC Re Assistant Manager · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Treating 'reinsurance' and 'coinsurance' as interchangeable and picking whichever option sounds more technical in definition-based questions on proportional and non-proportional covers.
Candidates cram the reinsurance chapter as vocabulary lists rather than as a risk-transfer structure, so they never map quota share, surplus, facultative, and excess of loss onto who bears what proportion of loss, and the terminology collapses under exam pressure.
What to do instead
Build a one-page matrix before revising: rows are quota share, surplus, facultative, pro-rata treaty, excess of loss, and stop loss; columns are who retains what, how the cession is calculated, and a numeric example. Redo a worked example for each row until you can compute the ceded and retained amount without notes.
Answering insurance-regulation questions from general knowledge of 'how insurance works' instead of from the specific statutory and regulatory framework the question is testing, such as the role of IRDAI, licensing, or policyholder-protection provisions.
Many candidates come from a general commerce or banking background and assume insurance regulation mirrors banking regulation, so they import concepts like deposit insurance or capital adequacy rules that do not map cleanly onto insurance solvency and intermediary licensing.
What to do instead
Maintain a short fact sheet on the regulator's functions, the classes of insurance registration, key intermediary categories, and the broad duties toward policyholders. For each item, write one line on what the provision actually requires rather than what sounds plausible, and re-test yourself weekly.
In quantitative aptitude, setting up the arithmetic correctly but losing the answer in unit or scale errors, such as mixing percentage points with percentages, or treating a ratio as a fraction of the wrong base.
Exam questions are deliberately built around base-shifting traps (successive discounts, percentage increase then decrease, ratio changes after a transfer), and candidates under time pressure apply the first formula that comes to mind without restating what the base quantity is.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed habit: before computing, write the base and the target as a labelled line ('base = original premium; target = revised premium'). For percentage-change problems, always check with a concrete number such as 100. Practise ten base-shift problems daily until the restatement step is automatic.
Spending disproportionate time on one hard data-interpretation set or puzzle and leaving easier later questions unattempted.
Candidates treat every question as equally worth solving and lack a pre-planned triage rule, so sunk cost on a single calculation or seating arrangement consumes the clock that simpler questions needed.
What to do instead
Set a per-question cap in advance (for example 90 seconds on reasoning, 60 on arithmetic) and a hard rule to mark and move on. In mocks, log how many questions were left blank versus wrong; the blank count is usually the cheaper loss to fix, and pacing drills should target it directly.
In English, choosing an answer because it 'sounds right' in reading comprehension and error-spotting, without locating the supporting sentence or the grammatical rule involved.
Candidates rely on fluency intuition built from casual reading, but exam items are constructed around subtle distinctions such as subject-verb agreement with collective nouns, misplaced modifiers, and inference versus restatement in comprehension passages.
What to do instead
For comprehension, underline the exact line that supports the chosen option and reject any option that requires information not in the passage, even if it is true in general. For grammar items, name the rule being tested before selecting. Review every error by writing the rule, not just the correct option.
In the stream-specific section, answering from broad professional instinct rather than from the specific technical definition the paper expects, for example confusing morbidity with mortality, or incidence with prevalence in a medical stream.
The stream paper tests precise domain vocabulary and its application, and candidates with working experience often use shorthand that is correct in conversation but wrong as a formal definition in an exam setting.
What to do instead
Compile a definitions sheet for your stream (for medical: mortality versus morbidity, incidence versus prevalence, waiting periods, pre-existing disease, sub-limits; for actuarial: premium bases, reserves, IBNR; for IT: control objectives and audit trails; for legal: contract essentials and indemnity versus liability). Write each definition in one sentence and test yourself by matching terms to scenarios.
Ignoring the interactions between domains, such as failing to connect a claims-related arithmetic question to the underlying insurance concept, or missing that a legal question depends on a reinsurance structure.
Candidates revise domains in isolated silos and never practise the cross-domain questions that the exam uses to separate rote learners from candidates who understand the business, so a conceptually simple item becomes unsolvable once it is framed in unfamiliar language.
What to do instead
Do mixed sets where each question is tagged with two domains. After each, write one sentence explaining how the two domains connect. Pay special attention to claims reserving, premium computation, and policy wording interpretation, which are the usual meeting points.
Under-preparing for the professional section on the assumption that the general insurance and quantitative sections carry the score, and arriving with only superficial stream knowledge.
Candidates allocate study time by perceived difficulty rather than by marks available, and the stream section feels familiar because it overlaps with their job, so it gets the least deliberate practice despite often carrying substantial weight.
What to do instead
Check the actual marks distribution and build a study plan proportionally, reserving at least a quarter of total preparation time for the stream section. Use scenario-based questions rather than definitions alone, since the paper tests application, and take timed sectional tests to confirm retention.
Reading the question stem once and answering the remembered version of it, missing qualifiers such as 'except', 'not', 'most appropriate', or 'which of the following is incorrect'.
Under time pressure the eye skips negation and superlatives, and the brain completes the pattern with the more common positive framing, so the candidate selects a true statement when an untrue one was requested.
What to do instead
Circle or mentally flag every negation and superlative before evaluating options. For 'except' and 'not' items, restate the stem in your own words as a positive statement first. In review, classify each error as a knowledge gap or a stem-reading error; if the latter dominates, slow down on the first pass rather than the second.
Revising only from notes and never simulating the real paper, so timing, sectional order, and negative-marking strategy are untested until exam day.
Candidates equate familiarity with recall and assume that knowing content implies performing under a clock, but the exam rewards pacing, selective guessing, and stamina, none of which improve from reading alone.
What to do instead
Take at least four full-length timed mocks under exam conditions, including the sectional time limits and no breaks. After each, record accuracy per domain, time per question, and the net effect of guesses. Use the data to set a guessing rule and a sectional time budget, then adjust the study plan toward the weakest accuracy domain.