This is the story of How I Practiced for my Six Sigma Exams

When I was studying for my Six Sigma Green Belt exam years ago (before there was a lot of six sigma practice exam material on the internet), I didn’t have the benefit of six sigma practice exams and that made life difficult.

Honestly, thank God it was an open book exam. I had paid for the course out of my own pocket because my company only wanted managers to have this training. I was just out of college and certainly not a manager.

Conversations about getting the company to pay for my Six Sigma training was like so:

Ted (fresh-faced software engineer just out of college): “Hi boss. I noticed our CEO endorses the Six Sigma movement at GE. I’d like to train up on this and see if I could help our team embrace it.

Ted’s former Boss: “Hey, you, code monkey!  Stop worrying about this Six Sigma stuff and get back in your cubicle!”

Yeah. Not a great place to be.

So, imagine how worried I was that I wouldn’t pass the exam and I would be out the $1500 I had paid for it – especially since I had crushing college debt, a car loan, and had just bought a house (the early 2000s were a crazy time.)

Anyway, I somehow passed my Green belt exam but it wasn’t a great experience. I promised myself I wouldn’t make such a reckless gamble of time and money again. There was no way I was ever going into an exam with that much doubt in the future.

Why I Collected Free Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt Practice Exams

For my first Black Belt exam (Villanova) I still couldn’t find a decent practice test but I was able to use the quizzes in my training courses to simulate the experience. They warned me that there was more to the certifying exam than they had put in their course! So no matter how well I did on the quizzes or learned their material, there was more topics that I had not  exposed to.

There were only 2 options; gather free six sigma practice exams and buy them.

The Problems with Free Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt Practice Exams

So I collected a large list of free practice questions. But that didn’t really help:

  1. There are no explanations of why something was right or wrong. Sometimes I really, really thought that my answer was right and the one they put out was wrong.
  2. It’s really hard to find practice exams that cover all the topics you need to pass your exams.

The Problems with Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt Practice Exams for Sale

For my second Black Belt certification the ASQ I used practice questions and a cd-based desktop software and that worked OK. There were still a few issues:

  1. It was expensive
  2. The questions were not well-written.
  3. There was very little in the way of why a question was right or wrong.
    • They wanted me to pay even more for access to materials that explained!
  4. No integration between what I was learning for a test and what I was practicing in real-life.
    • That lack of context made memorizing difficult.
  5. Every study pack is geared towards one exam or another  – while they all have at least 85% overlap!
    • Why was I having to buy brand new guides for every kind of certification? (ASQ, IASSC, Villanova, etc?)
  6. The software was only useful when I was at home using a desktop.
    • Who uses cds anymore? I don’t even have a computer with a CD or DVD player.
    • I wasn’t allowed to install software on my work computer.
    • Who gets downtime to study at home? I traveled a ton and all of my downtime was on airplanes, trains, and while waiting for other things. I needed a mobile solution that I could use anywhere.

Where do you go from here?