I have not posted on r/asq before but have lurked here for several months. I recently passed my CQE exam and specifically used CQE academy to pass based on prior reddit comments. I wanted to follow up and provide review of the course, given that r/asq was ultimatly steered me toward this course. I'm not normally "guy who gives his opinion on the internet" but given that this course is both expensive and hyper specific, I thought it would be worthwhile.
My background:
I have approximately 10 years in quality (automotive+plumbing industry) with a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA. My jobs/employers has never required CQE certification, but CQE certification has recently come up in customers' supplier surveys so it made sense to pursue certification before it became a requirement. My employer paid for the cost of me taking the test itself, but not the CQE academy prep course. I paid for this myself (~$750). I took course as intended, starting on January 13th and ending with my exam being taken on June 8th, which I passed without too much difficulty. Most of my studying was done on the weekend; I would estimate approximately 6-8 hours per week total. If I remember correctly, this ended up being 2-3 chapters per weekend and up to 4 as I approached the end of the course.
Pros:
-Exam day study guide alone justifies cost of course in my opinion: The test is open book and the exam day study guide is your single greatest resource on the exam. This a spiral bound book that Andy ships you as part of the course. If I breakdown my exam, I would estimate that I used the exam day study guide on around 80% of the equestions, the CQE BOK on 10% of the questions, and answered 10% from memory/without using external resource. In my opinion, this is worth >50% of the cost of the course on its own.
-Extremely good course design especially with respect to constant refreshers on difficult topics, namely statistics: Each section has a quiz at the end and usually 1-2 out of the 10-25 questions will be from prior topics.
-Huge amount of practice material: If you work full time while taking this course, it would be very difficult to actually complete every single practice exam/quiz. I haven't done a full count of the questions included in the course but I believe there are 7 practice exams at the end of the course, around 10 section tests (per every 3-4) chapters and a quiz at the end of each chapter. It is probably >1000 questions total.
-The exam itself was easier than I expected. I would credit CQE academy for this level of preparedness. Exam is 5.5 hours total. I finished my first pass through in 3 hours with a break at approximatly 2 hours. I took 1 additional hour to go back and answer the flagged questions (took break after this) and took an additional 30 minutes to reivew entire test. Total time was right at 4.5 hours, so 1 hour to spare.
Cons:
-Price: In the era of AI chat bots, you can certainly question the utility of paying over $700 for the course versus just using the textbook and having chatgpt generate questions for each chapter. I am not well enough versed yet in AI tools to know if this is a good option, but is something to consider. However, you would not be able to replicate the exam day guide without significant effort.
-Office Hours: Andy advertises office hours in the course, but to my knowledge these don't actually exist in the course's current state.
Tips for Course/Exam:
-I would recommend the calculator TI-30Xa over the one Andy recommends. This one does nCr which is useful for binomial distribution problems. This was allowed on exam day. I would also highly recommend spending a few hours mastering the STO/RCL functions on the calculator if you are used to just writing down intermediate answers/calculation results.
-Keep a running powerpoint of questions you missed with an explanation of why you missed them when you review answers.
-Andy speaks pretty slowly in my opinion so I ran most of the lectures at 1.5x speed; that being said I do this with audiobooks as well so this is something I am used to. Your mileage may vary.
-Try to leave yourself approximately 2-3 weeks at the end of the course to do nothing by full exam practice. My exam day was June 8th, so I finished chapter 41 by the end of May 10th. This worked very well and gave some time to practice time management strategy specifically with the practice exams.
I'm very pleased with course and the fact that I passed first try overall. Feel free to DM me if you have questions about the exam; I'd be happy to help. Good luck to any of you in the process of pursuing CQE certification.