So one of the calculations they have us do in the Statistics section is to calculate the "safer" investment. The one less likely to have returns below our worst-case of say, a 10% loss. In a cold, windy harbinger of things to come, i.e., Modern Portfoli Theory, the whole thing is based on inferences from normally-distributed price movements.
Right.
OK, maybe that's a bit extreme. But the idea of having to memorize the formulas for covariance, correlation, and the various t-scores, p-scores, chi-square scores is a bit much. I know it's typical for professional certification exams. But after having spent my undergrad physics & math career, and most of my graduate career, with open-book or cheat-sheet exams, it seems a bit silly.
The fact is, the calcuator will do most of this for us, anyway. What it won't do is tell us which test is appropriate for which type of data. And that's really what the exam ought to be testing, anyway.