CQA EXAM

[MMayhew]

Hello,

Looking for exam tips....need help!

 

[GStough]

Study, study, study! Try to get as much experience (after you've completed qualified training course/s) as you can before you take the exam. This will help more than you might think. Remember, you can bring reference material into the exam with you (it's open book). Also, be sure you stay hydrated and drink water. Purchase the practice exams and go through them. When the time comes to take the exam, go through the whole thing answering the easiest questions first. Save the harder ones for later. Repeat that process until you've completed all of the questions.

 

[yodon]

I found the materials from the Quality Council of Indiana extremely helpful.

 

[GStough]

I found the materials from the Quality Council of Indiana extremely helpful.

Yes, I agree, yodon.

 

[Tidge]

I don't know how the computer-base exams work, but when I was taking the paper-based ones, here was my strategy:

• I made a first pass, spending 0.5 to 1 minute on every question, answering it and/or categorizing it per the BoK. I flagged questions that I did not answer that I had to come back to.
• After the first pass, I went back and revisited the unanswered questions, by BoK area.
• I have a bad habit of trying to solve "math problems", so I always left them for last, so as to not accidentaly spend too much time on them.
• The ASQ exams are multiple-choice, so the correct answer can be found by eliminating the distractors (wrong answers). When the question bank is supposed to include plausible distractors, but in my experience (taking exams, writing & reviewing questions for the question bank) there are often many questions that are one correct answer and nothing else but implausible distractors. This is also true of the "math problems", often it is just a question of eliminating the answers that are not mathematically possible. (There is not much in the CQA exam)

The exams are "open book", but the folks I know who have not passed an ASQ exam often spent too much time looking up answers. My advice to divide up questions by BoK area allows the test taker to stay in one section of their preferred reference material for many questions at once.

When I took the CQA exam, I had my study guide (no sample tests are allowed!) and my copy of the ASQ "Z tables" (Z1.4, and Z1.8) in case I needed to answer a specific question about sampling. I think I also kept printed copies of a couple of basic math tables (fractional area under a normal distribution, a table of binomial distribution calculations for hypothesis testing for a handful of one-sided alphas (and 2 different powers).

The CQA exam is IMO, one of the easier ones to take/pass.

 

[Tidge]

Now, as for preparation....

Keep the BoK close at hand, as it will very clearly layout the areas to consider and the fractional breakdown (i.e. how many questions to expect in what areas). Many of the ASQ certification BoK rely on common, foundational areas:

1. General Quality Concepts and History
2. (Project) Planning and Execution.

I wanted to call these out specifically, because if you borrow resources that others have used for different ASQ exams, material that covers those topics will be useful to CQA certification. That is, those parts of a CQE primer will help just fine. Audit Planning will be something covered in the BoK, and you should study that specifically, but having a general understanding of project planning will be very helpful. If there is any difference between the academic study of audit planning and project planning, it is that generally audits don't "go wrong" (for the auditor!) so project risk management isn't as fundamental for CQA certification.

I also recommend the QCI primers, with one caveat (for ASQ certifications). The caveat is that the questions used in the ASQ question banks derive (or are supposed to) derive from primary resources and not from primers. This means that there will almost certainly be some small amount of terminology used in at least one question (or answer, or distractor) that isn't used in the QCI primer. There is no inoculation against this, you simply have to be widely read enough to have encountered the different terminology. This isn't meant to be a trap, it is more that the primary source used in the question bank may have used terminology that is consistent in its area but not common in others. Question writers have to identify their primary sources for questions and answers, and IIRC they are also supposed to rationalize the plausible distractors. When I took the CQA exam, I specifically remember that for one question there was a term used for a type of sampling I had never encountered before (and was not in my reference material... and it was pretty rare in a post-exam Google search), but I recognized all the other terms as wrong answers. If a single question misleads almost all test takers in the same way, I believe ASQ essentially discards the question from that exam's results and flags it in the question bank.

 

[John Predmore]

Read each multiple-choice question carefully. Sometimes the most-correct answer is settled based on a single word in the question. I also like the QCI study guide, which not only gives prior test questions and answers, but explains WHY one answer is the most-correct answer.

 

[Shashivardhan]

I found the materials from the Quality Council of Indiana extremely helpful.

Hi Yodon,
can you share me data if possible to my mail [email protected]. Thank you in anticipation.

 

[hogheavenfarm]

Not sure if they still conduct these tests early in the morning, but if so, I have found an energy drink to be a great help before the test. There used to be some good guides in the resources section (or attachments, I don't rightly remember).

 

[yodon]

can you share me data if possible to my mail [email protected]. Thank you in anticipation.

Not sure what data you'd like me to share, but the website is here: https://www.qualitycouncil.com/

You should be able to find the materials there. The CQA information, for example, can be found from the Certification Materials dropdown > Primers > CQA. Pretty straight-forward.