EXAM - Exam Techniques

Since the exam is open book, we need to prepare for very rapid lookups of information contained within reference material.

A couple things that I'm starting to see as common open book exam strategies:

(1) Separate the Table of Contents from your reference material to avoid having to flip back and forth

(2) Separate the appendix from your reference material (same reason as above)

(3) Gail recommended tagging a couple summary pages in the CSQE Primer for quick lookup.

And a couple other things that I will try ...

(4) If no copyright infringements exist, I'll make a copy of the TOC and appendix, because I read about somebody who brought their reference material and forgot their detached TOC, making things much more difficult.

(5) I will bring a copy of all printable glossaries

(6) I need to create some cross references of ISO standards, Quality Gurus, Management Standards, etc. for quick lookups. I'll use a format of "keyword", standard name, page reference in texts. Here are a couple posted on a free hosting service called divshare.com - you can view these online or click on Download original then Skip Ad (there are lots of ads with this free service).
Here's a cross-reference of STANDARDS
Here's a cross-reference of QUALITY GURUS

Please note: Sometimes divshare.com servers are unavailable for hours at a time. If you want to take these to the exam, I would print these at least a week ahead of time.

(7) In addition to highlighting information in the textbook, I'm also highlighting all headings to quickly locate subject material on a page.

(8) Another of Gail's suggestions was to make frequent use of sticky notes as tabs for quick access. I'll probably use one color for each chapter, then another color for topics within each chapter.

(9) Oh yeah. Don't forget to remove all sample exam questions from the books. These are not allowed in the exam room and could create hassle that you don't want to deal with.

(10) While discussing the open book policy with Bruce, we both agree that it's still critically important to know as much material as we possibly can. At an average of 90 seconds per question, there's just not enough time to look up a lot of answers.