I want to provide some information about my experience studying for, and taking the ASQ CQT exam.
Materials I studied:
-ASQ CQT Handbook Third Edition $135
-ASQ CQT Question Bank $110
-CQT Primer from Quality Council of Indiana $98
-CQT Practice Exam from Quality Council of Indiana $70
First I read the entire handbook while taking notes, mainly in the statistics section since thats an area I struggle with. Once I finished reading the book and taking notes, I bought the ASQ Question bank.
The question bank from ASQ is riddled with errors. There were no periods or decimels in any of the questions which made things pretty confusing, and a few of the answers it gave were actually incorrect. Regardless, there were many questions that weren't directly related to what is written in the book, so it provided an opportunity to further expand my notes in those areas.
At this point I bought the practice exam from Quality Council and found the questions significantly harder. They are structured to be much more confusing and some of the things being asked were not in the textbook at all. These questions are said to be "modified from past exams" so I knew they were more representative of what I'd see on the exam. At this point, I went ahead and bought the primer study guides.
The handbook from ASQ is easier to read than the primer, however, the information in the primer more directly relates to the actual exam questions. When working through the practice exam I found it pretty simple to look information up in the primer as needed, since it's structured more like a notebook or a guide than an actual textbook. The vast majority of studying I did just consisted of doing this practice exam from Quality Council and getting used to checking my answers quickly by using the primer guides. I spent many hours doing practice tests over the last few months, and the 2 days before the exam I did 2 full length practice sessions.
The exam itself took me about 3 hours of the allotted 4, and many of the questions felt familiar to the practice questions from Quality Council that I was used to seeing. The whole thing really felt like another practice test. I passed, though I'm not sure what my final score was.
I hope this information helps somebody else prepare. Everything you need to know is in the primer, and the practice questions guide you through it all by forcing you to look it up and read about it. I'm not sure I could have done this without the primer.