ASQ® CQA | How to pass your Certified Quality Auditor Exam? | (2024)

The Certified Quality Auditor (ASQ - CQA) are professionals who understands the standards and principles of auditing and the auditing techniques of examining, questioning, evaluating and reporting to determine a quality system's adequacy and deficiencies.

This is one of the oldest certification (and not very difficult to pass the exam) offered by ASQ. The exam consists of 165 questions, and out of these only 150 questions are evaluated for scoring.

Eligibility:

Before applying for the ASQ CQA certification you might want to do is to check if you qualify to appear in this exam.

You need to have a minimum of 8 years of paid full time work experience in the field related to auditing. However depending upon your educational qualification a certain numbers o work experience years can be waived off.

For more details on the minimum qualification and experience to take this exam, please refer to this link.

If you qualify for the exam, then submit your application for the exam.

Exam Details:

The computer-based ASQ CQA examination consists of 165 multiple choice question, five-and-a-half-hour exam and is offered in English only. 150 multiple choice questions are scored, and 15 are unscored. You will not know whether a question is scored or not scored.

It is the open book exam. You can take any book or binder in the exam. Loose sheets and multiple choice questions are not allowed in the examination room.

ASQ CQA Exam Passing Score:

You need 550 marks out of 750 to get certified. However these marks are not calculated simply by dividing the correct answers divided by total number of questions. Instead ASQ does do the balancing to ensure that difficulty of the particular exam is taken into consideration.

ASQ CQA Body of Knowledge:

Here is the break down of questions:

If you look at this table, you will see that around half of the questions are from Section II and IV, which are "Audit Process" and "Audit Program Management and Business Applications".

Now lets come to the question of how to prepare for the exam, what are the resources?

Suggested Study Material:

I would strongly recommend the ASQ Auditing Handbook for study.

In addition to these two resources, I will also recommend my CQA Exam Preparation online course and CQA Practice Tests (320 Questions) available on Udemy. This course is based on the ASQ CQA Body of Knowledge and covers all topics in plain and simple language.

I also a have a CQA Exam Preparation Quiz where you can attempt 10 random questions at a time. You have free access to this quiz. If you think the statistics part of the exam is difficult for you then consider taking this practice course, where I provide 100+ probability and statistics questions with individual video solutions.

Calculator:

ASQ does not allow programmable calculator in the exam. It does suggest a list of calculators allowed in the exam. Most commonly used calculator is TI-30Xa. This is a simple calculator and has statistical functions.

However, we suggest Casio fx-991MS for the exam. This is a scientific calculator.

Casio fx-991MS can perform many advanced functions quickly, without needing to actually use complex formulas and tables. Some of these advanced functions include:

- Finding out the mean and standard deviation of a group of numbers

- Solving the Simple Linear Regression questions (You will not believe how easy it is if you have not used a scientific calculator like fx-991MS)

- Normal Distribution questions (You will not need to open the Z-table to solve them)

- Solving equations with one, two or three unknowns

- Using calculator memory for complex calculations

Get used to the calculator that you will use in the exam. We have a course on how to efficiently use Casio fx-991MS calculator. Click here for a special discount.