“Help! I Didn’t Pass My Six Sigma Exam”
I get this message a lot. After my 2016 Lessons Learned article, so many people wrote in that they tried to take a Six Sigma exam last year and didn’t pass.
Don’t worry. Many people don’t pass the first time. In fact, it was when several outstanding colleagues of mine didn’t pass that I realized how much effort it was going to take.
As I mentioned last week, I am writing a few more specific articles that should help.
The first thing I would recommend would be to sit down and decide why you didn’t pass. Were you able to put the appropriate amount of time into studying? Did the test have more of a certain type or different questions than you anticipated? Did the test play to your weak areas instead of your strengths?
Whatever it was, it is important to realize this is just a temporary setback.
One wrinkle worth planning for: not every certifying body gives you a section-level breakdown. A reader who missed the Villanova Black Belt exam by a single point told me exactly this problem: “I was hoping to discover my area of weakness so that I may study those areas harder but they don’t give any feedback on the test.” If that is your situation, you cannot rely on an official score report to point you at your weak spots. Instead, take a fresh full-length practice exam under real conditions and score it yourself, section by section, using the answer key’s topic tags. That self-scored breakdown becomes your diagnostic when the certifying body will not hand you one.
The important thing to do is to learn from that experience and make a new plan to achieve your goal this year.
In the meantime, I did write a lengthy PDF covering very specific studying tactics to do. Please take the survey here and you’ll be directed right to the pdf. Thousands have used that process to prepare for their exam. Yes, it takes hard work. Yes, I am working on building something to make the process easier. Perhaps this process will work for you, too.
One audience member describes how he passed his exam:
Preparing well organized notes for terminologies and important formulas and dividing the notebook for sections of the DMAIC phases to find the notes quickly was important! The test was computerized, but not to worry, just read the instructions carefully! A digital calculator was provided although you can bring your own also. Preparation and test practices were essential as you can’t rely on the notes for each question, you will run out of time! Finally a good night sleep, well balanced diet before the exam and good water intake are necessary for concentrating!
For a greater end-to-end overview I’ve written an article as general overview on how to study. And this article shows how I prepared for the Villanova Six Sigma Black Belt and this other article shows exactly what I did to pass the ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt exam on the first try.
A Concrete Reset Plan
If you’d rather have a structured starting point than figure one out from scratch, here’s a reasonable reset sequence after a failed attempt:
- Take a fresh full-length practice exam immediately, before studying anything new, so your weak-topic list reflects where you actually stand right now, not where you stood before the real exam.
- Score it by topic, not just overall, and rank topics from worst to best.
- Spend roughly 70% of your remaining study time on the bottom third of that list, and the rest on general review, rather than splitting time evenly across every topic again.
- Re-test with a different practice exam after two to three weeks to confirm the weak spots actually improved before scheduling the real retake.
This isn’t fundamentally different from what got you most of the way there the first time; it’s a tighter, more targeted version aimed specifically at whatever the first attempt revealed.
The Mindset Piece
Beyond the mechanics of a retake plan, it’s worth naming the emotional side directly: a failed certification attempt can feel like a referendum on your competence, especially if colleagues or a manager know you took it. It isn’t. Pass rates for these exams are not 100%, and a single attempt is a noisy measurement of your actual knowledge, affected by which specific questions you happened to get, how you were feeling that day, and plenty of factors that have nothing to do with how prepared you actually are. Treat the retake as a correction to a measurement, not a referendum on your ability.
You’ve already proven you can put in the work to get this far. Finishing the job is well within reach.
Whatever you decide, don’t let one exam result talk you out of a goal you clearly cared enough about to attempt in the first place.
Please give those a try and let me know how else I can best help.
Did you pass an exam? Reply in the comments here and share your best tips!
Didn’t pass? Leave a comment on this post and let me know how I can help.
Best, Ted.
PS In case it is helpful, here is an article I wrote for the ASQ Influential Voices Blog on how people just starting out in a career in quality succeed.