Preparing for an ASQ Certification Exam

If you are planning on taking one of the ASQ certification exams, congratulations.  You have made an excellent decision, the process of becoming certified strengthens your career progression and solidifies you professionally.  There are many ways to prepare for the exam and over the years we have observed people approach the exam in many different ways.  Some prefer to study on their own, some like to study with other people and some prefer to have a structure of class environment to help them along.  We have been associated with the ASQ Certification exams and  preparation courses for over fifteen years.  That experience has provided us an understanding of what works and what doesn’t when preparing for the exam.  We have learned a solid approach to passing the certification exam involves a four step process we call material – testing – modification – repetition.

Material  means you know what material the exam covers and you study and learn the material. Testing means you test yourself on what you’ve learned.  Modification is taking the results of the testing and strengthening the areas you are weak in.  Repetition is simply doing it over and over.  Do not do in once a week, do a little bit every day. The continuous repetition is what cements the knowledge within you.  

The first thing you should obtain is a summary of the material you need to study.  This material is called the body of knowledge for the specific ASQ Certification Exam you are preparing for.  You can obtain the  ASQ Certification body of knowledge for the certification exams at the ASQ website.  The BOK or Body of Knowledge not only explains what is covered, but it gives you the weighting of each area and the level of cognition for each area of the BOK.  The cognition level is very important to understand because you do not need to know everything very well.  Some areas of the BOK you will only have to remember or recall and some you will have to be able to analyze and apply.  Spend some time reviewing the BOK and become very familiar with it.  Once you have completed reviewing the BOK, you should find reference materials.  An excellent source of material are the primers from the Quality Council of Indiana.  The primers developed by the Quality Council of Indiana provide good, broad coverage and are aligned very well with the ASQ BOK.  We have used the primers for many years for our preparation courses.

One of the downsides of the primers is their lack of detail relative to other reference books.  If a topic exists that requires supplemental information to the primer,  ASQ’s website provides a wide selection of reference books for the ASQ certification exams. 

Another method you can employ is to take a refresher course or a preparation course for the exam.  They are offered by various ASQ sections throughout the country as well as ASQ National in Milwaukee.  The benefit of a refresher course is that you will be provided with the materials  and you have an instructor who has knowledge of the material teaching you.  This avenue can save on time down the road.  You don’t have to take a preparation course, you can achieve the certification on your own.  It’s a personal decision for people similar to hiring a consultant when implementing ISO 9000.

After you have the material and have studied it, the next thing you want to do is test yourself.  The primers from the Quality Council of Indiana has sample questions included and you can purchase an extra CD of questions.  This is a very good tool.  There are sample exams online at ASQ.  If you are a member, you can take a sample certification exam online with ASQ.  You can also purchased a bank of questions from ASQ.  The important thing is to test yourself after you have studied the material to assess how well you understand the material.  Do not glance over the material and immediately go to the sample exams.  When you test yourself, ensure it is a timed exam.   This gets you conditioned for the actual ASQ exam, which is timed. 

The next step after testing is modification.  After testing yourself you will understand what you are strong at and what you need help with.  You should modify your studying to compensate for this.  If you are studying for the Certified Quality Engineer exam and you find that you are weak in the quantitative methods, you know you have to spend more time in this area or change the way you have been studying.  If you are very strong in statistical tools but are weak in the management and leadership area, you may want to study in that area.  You must also commit the proper amount of time to an area within the body of knowledge consistent with its weighting on the exam.  For example, on the Certified Quality Engineer exam, Management and Leadership will have 15 questions while Quantitative methods will have 45 questions on the exam.  You probably don’t want to commit the same amount of time to both sections because they are not equally represented on the exam.

The last step or phase of the preparation is repetition.  Your study habits or pattern must have a constant repetitive focus.  Do not approach this by studying one day a week for six hours.  It is much better to study an hour a day for six days.  The goal is to build momentum and confidence leading into the exam.  You can’t accomplish that by only putting effort in on one or two days a week.  You will forget a big part of the information.  We recommend trying to do a little everyday.  If you miss a day or two, that’s alright, but your habit should be to study some everyday.  If you commit to that you will see the rewards long-term. 

However you choose to study for the ASQ Certification exam, we wish you the best of luck.  It is a great decision to take the exam and better yet pass it.