Last time, I taught you how you can use the Baseline Hack to create your customized Six Sigma certification exam study plan.
Quick review of that strategy…
Step 1: Find the BOK (that’s Body of Knowledge) for your Six Sigma Belt and Organization.
Step 2: Take a practice exam for that belt & organization.
Step 3: Score each question by topic and subtopic, and determine your area of greatest need.
Today I thought I’d send you a few examples of this in action to help you along…
Example #1: Jennifer is studying for the ASQ Six Sigma Green Belt.
Jennifer doesn’t have a lot of time so she’s interested in figuring out how to optimize her studying. Let’s walk through the process.
Step 1: Find the BOK.
Easy enough. The ASQ Six Sigma Green Belt BOK right here on my website.
You can see that it lists all of the items Jennifer is required to study. There are also links so she can brush up on anything she’s not familiar with.
Step 2: Take a practice exam for that belt & organization.
Again, easy here. Jennifer has 3 options:
- Free, published exams:
- There’s not a lot of great quality out there. And you have to manually sift through them and categorize them yourself.
- If you are short on $ and long on time they’ll work out.
- Best if you have regular access to an instructor, a study group, and are self-driven and well-organized.
- I link to my favorites here.
- My Free Trial Automated System:
- I automated a few of my favorite practice exams from ASQ and IASSC. This is a great option if you’re short on $ and short on time.
- There are green belt and black belt options.
- For the greenbelt, one sample exam has 26 questions and the other has 15.
- For the black belt, one sample exam has 75.
- Will automatically score and sort your tests for you.
- A helpful start
- You can sign up for free here.
- I automated a few of my favorite practice exams from ASQ and IASSC. This is a great option if you’re short on $ and short on time.
- Pass Your Six Sigma Exam System
- Perfect if you’re short on time, don’t have access to a full-time instructor or a mentor or a study group.
- Tons of benefits including Multiple assessment exams.
- Great for studying in short, effective bursts.
- Can sign up here.
Jennifer elected to use my Pass Your Six Sigma Exam system, because she wanted to study as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
First, she took the Sample ASQ Green Belt exam:
Step 3: Score each question by topic and subtopic, and determine your area of greatest need
You could do this by hand. For example, if you go to the last page of the ASQ sample exam they code each question by sub topic. And if not, you can use your BOK to make a note of what the representation is.
I like easy buttons. So I built a system that does this for you automatically.
And she got a score in a format that looked like this:
Note: these are not Jennifer’s results, I just needed a quick screen capture ;’)
Let’s match those results to the BOK using our matrix.
There’s no 2 ways about it. A score of 68% means there’s a lot of work to be done.
But could that work be done more efficiently? Let’s see.
Obviously, Jennifer needs to spend much more time in the Define section. She got 2 questions wrong out of the 6 on the quiz – or 60% in that section. But when you realize the quiz only had 25 questions and there will be 100 on her exam, you can see that Define section should have around 25 questions – meaning there’s 25 points available for her there.
But she only got 20 points out of 30! Ouch!!
Analysis:
In order to bring up her score with the least amount of effort, I’d recommend she should focus on Define first and Analyze second.
If she mastered the Define topic, her new score would be 68 + 10% = 78%. That’s very doable with just a few hours of study. I’d recommend consistently scoring above 80% on practice exams before taking the real exam. Imagine, by prioritizing her studying to the concepts that would give her the most points she’d only have to invest a few hours to be ready for the exam. Pretty good return if you ask me!
So, what would that look like? Well, it would probably be best to gather as many questions on that topic as possible, then narrow to a sub topic and study incrementally until mastery is achieved.
Again, you could do this manually or let my system do it for you:
We will jump into an example of how you can use the detail analysis to fine-tune your study plan even more in the next example.
But finishing up Jennifer’s example, her next step would be to repeat the process for the Analyze Phase, because that’s the next area of greatest need. This would net her an additional 9 points and put her baseline at 87%!! This can be done in a few days.
In order to keep improving, just get another practice exam once the main issues are covered.
Let’s look at another candidate following the same process.
Example #2: Mitul is studying for the IASSC Six Sigma Green Belt.
Let’s walk through the process
Step 1: Find the BOK.
Easy enough. The IASSC Green Belt BOK is right here on my website. (Here’s the direct link.)
Step 2: Take a practice exam for that belt & organization.
Again, easy here. He used my study guide which has an on-line version of this exam practice exam. But since IASSC only provide 15 really easy questions, he uses my practice exam to get a thorough baseline.
He takes the IASSC practice exam and gets these results:
It looks like Mitul should focus on the Control Phase. But since there are only 15 relatively easy questions on the IASSC sample exam, he decides to take the larger assessment exam of 50 questions.
Step 3: Score each question by topic and subtopic, and determine your area of greatest need
Again, you could do this by hand. But I like easy buttons. So I built a system that does this for you automatically.
Note: Here’s this isn’t his score, but he’d get a report that looks like the following:
Since we are primarily interested in the Control section, let’s match those results to the BOK using our matrix.
Analysis:
Looks like Mitul only got 45% of the control questions correct. That’s better than the 33% he got over all on his baseline, but you can notice that here he got several sections entirely wrong. That means that he really has little grasp of those specific concepts. If the real exam avoids the topics he knows well and focuses on the topics he doesn’t know well, it’s unlikely he will pass.
In order to bring up his score with the least amount of effort, I’d recommend he should focus on the Attribute Charts and X bar S charts first.
If he mastered those topic, his could expect his new baseline scores to improve measurably. That’s very doable with just an hour or two of study. Again, prioritizing your study plan gives a pretty good return if you ask me!
His next step would be to repeat for the next topics, because they are the next areas of greatest need.
In order to keep improving, just get another practice exam once the main issues are covered.
…
You can repeat this process for any exam on any organization you wish. I chose to model just the combinations above but the principal holds.
Now it’s your turn.
Take the next 5 minutes to find your BOK. (Again, I have a list of the popular ones here. If I don’t list yours, let me know and I’m happy to add it!)
Then take a practice exam. If you have questions, great! If not, consider purchasing access to my system Pass Your Six Sigma Exam which provides 1000 questions, detailed explanations and a lot more.
Lastly, use your matrix to determine your areas of greatest needs.
(Note: For the exact template you can use to do this, refer to the examples above and back to Lesson #4.)
Quit procrastinating.
Set a timer for 5 minutes.
Then EXECUTE.
-Ted
…
There is a lot more to growing a customized study plan than just the Baseline Hack.
Once you’ve used this strategy, there are still questions like…
- How do I remember it all?
- How do I get the time to study?
- The question answers seem so similar, how do I pick the right one?
- I heard that the exam will test me on things they didn’t teach!! How do I find out what I should study?
- What are the best reference books to have?
- There are so many suggested books for my exam! How do I go through all of them?
- Are there any other ‘hacks’ you’d suggest I try?
- What if I took the exam already and didn’t pass before?
Want answers to these questions? The next lesson will help you. I’ll be answering several popular questions about how to solidify your customized study plan, what tools you should be using and how to actually pass your six sigma exam the first time.
If you’ve already joined Pass Your Six Sigma Exam, you’ll want to revisit Module 1, “The Foundation” to immediately access this training.
Here’s a recap of our training so far:
Lesson 1 – The very first step to studying for a Six Sigma exam
Lesson 2 – How to know exactly what will be on your Six Sigma certification exam
Lesson 3 – Behind the scenes of Successful Six Sigma Exam candidates
Lesson 4 – How to Dramatically Increase Your Chances of Passing a Six Sigma Certification Exam
Lesson 5 – Two Examples of How to Use the Baseline Hack Strategy
Lesson 6 – Additional Strategies and Tactics for your Six Sigma Exam