Deck 1: Black Belt

Question 1

As seen in Six Sigma methodology, the role of the leader has been transformed and updated in quality management to become that of a(an) ___________.

A)auditor
B)management consultant
C)problem-solver
D)business coach

Answer 1

problem-solver

Question 2

In enterprises, Black Belts work full-time on projects using Six Sigma tools and methodologies. Some business executives believe that Black Belts should constitute ________ of an organization's employees.

A)1%
B)0.1%
C)0.01%
D)0.001%

Answer 2

1%

Question 3

An enterprise's long-term strategic goals must match their organizational processes and objectives. One such method in Six Sigma methodology to provide a match is:

A)Hiroshima planning
B)Hoshin planning
C)Tachiki planning
D)TCP planning

Answer 3

Hoshin planning

Question 4

Six Sigma is a fact-based, rigorous methodology in process and quality improvement that aims for defect prevention in products rather than defect detection. Six Sigma quality performance means there are ____ defects per million opportunities.

A)1.5
B)5.1
C)4.3
D)3.4

Question 5

A business system is:

A)designed to implement a set of processes
B)implemented to encourage change management
C)used by executives to cut costs and increase profits
D)developed by engineers and other technical professionals alone

Question 6

Jason's team is launching a new support service network for their cellular phone customers. As the leader, Jason coordinates all functions of the launch and has sufficient managerial autonomy to make independent decisions. Jason is considered the:

A)yellow belt
B)process technician
C)process owner
D)trainee

Question 7

Janine is a senior financial manager who has ensured that the hospital in which she leads the finance department has all the resources necessary to implement Six Sigma methodologies. Janine is considered a:

A)black belt
B)champion
C)master black belt
D)green belt

Question 8

The following are all members of a project selection group EXCEPT:

A)key executive supporters
B)champions
C)green belts
D)master black belts

Question 9

A Six Sigma team is tasked with analyzing the risks involved in expanding their markets into locally competitive areas. What type of analysis would allow the team to explore opportunities available?

A)SPC
B)DMAIC
C)Hoshin
D)SWOT

Question 10

Black Belts and Master Black Belts are often tasked with conducting a closed-loop assessment of a Six Sigma methodology or project. This type of formal evaluation is done to ensure that the methodology was followed correctly and to assess its results. The following are questions that are likely asked in this assessment EXCEPT:

A)what new opportunities developed from the methodology?
B)what are the project's pro-forma projections?
C)how accurate were the SWOT projections?
D)how were challenged and difficulties assessed?

Question 11

Which quality management professional is referred to as the father of statistical quality control (SQC)?

A)Walter Shewhart
B)W. Edwards Deming
C)Joseph Juran
D)Philip Crosby

Question 12

In his famous book, Out of the Crisis, the following author developed a list of 14 points which are used to explore needs to change management structure:

A)Armand Feigenbaum
B)W. Edwards Deming
C)Philip Crosby
D)Joseph Juran

Question 13

While Six Sigma methodologies were being developed in the 1980s, this quality control approach was used by companies in that period and into the middle of the 1990s. In this approach, companies measure their performance with the best-in-class companies and this is referred to as:

A)balanced scorecard
B)reengineering
C)benchmarking
D)lean manufacturing

Question 14

Kaoru Ishikawa worked with other quality professionals such as W.E. Deming to advance quality management. Among his philosophies was for a company to put quality as its greatest priority and not short term profits. Ishikawa is also credited with the development of:

A)CTQ diagram
B)kaizen diagram
C)SWOT analysis
D)cause-and-effect diagram

Question 15

Processes are examined in terms of steps or units that turn inputs into an output such as a product or a service. The following are considered inputs EXCEPT:

A)mother nature
B)management
C)matrices
D)materials

Question 16

To capture the Voice of the Customer (VOC), it is important to collect data from a large, representative sample of the target customer base. To collect this data, Six Sigma practitioners can use:

A)government records
B)surveys and questionnaires
C)census data
D)case studies

Question 17

Penmanship Inc. produces high quality pencils for a select group of customers. Within each production cycle of 10,000 pencils, there are two types of defects that can occur at the following rates: wrong dimensions (80 defects) and faulty eraser (45 defects). What is the Defects per Unit (DPU) measurement of this process?

A)0.0125
B)0.0215
C)0.0275
D)0.0575

Question 18

Within each production cycle of 20,000 chairs, there are two types of defects that can occur at the following rates: wrong dimensions (240 defects) and loose bolts (100 defects). If the defects can occur only once in each item, what is the Defects per Million Opportunities (DPMO) measurement of this process?

A)8,500
B)5,800
C)3,400
D)6,800

Question 19

Design for Test is a design technique that offers a benefit of:

A)customer satisfaction tests
B)defect diagnosis
C)manufacturability
D)smaller process variation

Question 20

James is a Black Belt practitioner in a medium-sized organization. He engages in continuous assessment of projects and their potential impact on the organization's financial well-being. The cost of defects on an organization's finances is also referred to as:

A)COGQ
B)COPQ
C)CTQ
D)QTC

Question 21

A Six Sigma team is asked to calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) on a new training project to be implemented across the organization. The new training project would cost $600,000 over a period of 3 years and would involve 120 employees. The income from the project, including revenues and money saved, will be approximately $1.2 million in that same period. What is the ROI of this project?

A)$600,000
B)$1.2 million
C)1
D)100

Question 22

The following formula is used to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV or P as seen in the formula) of an investment that will yield a set amount after a given period. What do the A and i stand for? P = A (1 + i)^-n

A)current value; interest rate
B)future money; interest rate
C)interest rate; number of years
D)interest rate; current value

Question 23

Richard is promised an amount equal to $10,000 in two years if he keeps his investment with his family's restaurant. He is offered an annual interest rate of 5%. What is the Net Present Value (NPV) of Richard's investment?

A)$9,070
B)$7,090
C)$9,090
D)$3,070

Question 24

A Black Belt practitioner is hired by a construction company to oversee a large renovation project. The practitioner seeks to determine cost of quality by adding the costs of the following EXCEPT:

A)appraisal costs
B)prevention costs
C)promotion costs
D)internal failure costs

Question 25

Six months after the work of a contractor ends, a consumer's roof collapses. This is an example of a(an):

A)external failure
B)internal failure
C)prevention failure
D)appraisal failure

Question 26

A Black Belt practitioner is asked to facilitate a series of workshops in an organization. She notices that a few participants in the workshop are dominating the discussion. To provide leadership in this group setting, the practitioner must:

A)request that all speaking out of turn to leave
B)give every person a chance to contribute
C)end the workshop session early
D)separate the dominating participants from the group

Question 27

Team members designing a new interface for a business application choose items by prioritizing them individually. Those items given a high priority rating by the most number of team members are eventually included in the interface. This team tool is referred to as:

A)ordinal group technique
B)kaizen method
C)ishikawa's diagram
D)nominal group technique

Question 28

In a marketing project, distributing surveys to potential customers and gathering their responses is the phase that requires the most time. What is this portion of the project referred to?

A)project evaluation and review technique
B)project evaluation technique
C)review path method
D)critical path method

Question 29

Black Belt practitioners are responsible for team leadership in Six Sigma projects. The following are steps in team preparation EXCEPT:

A)set clear purposes and goals
B)conduct team-building exercises during the first meeting
C)publish a schedule of team meetings halfway through project
D)provide management support

Question 30

Teams undergo several stages in their growth. During the storming stage, team members:

A)argue for domination of discussions
B)struggle to understand their roles
C)reach a consensus on how to complete project
D)express their own ideas and opinions

Question 31

Michael's team is conducting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for the organization. After voicing disagreements on how to proceed in the initial phases, team members are now beginning to operate as a team not as a group of individuals. This stage in team growth is referred to as:

A)adjourning
B)norming
C)performing
D)forming

Question 32

When a team needs a number of fresh and innovative ideas, _________ techniques are used.

A)regression
B)solicitation
C)diversion
D)conversion

Question 33

Brett is a Black Belt practitioner who is leading a change management project in his organization. What is a common error committed during such a project?

A)providing clear functions to members whose jobs will change
B)giving incomplete or inadequate information about coming changes
C)making sure that adequate resources are available to help with the transition
D)establishing short-term and long-term goals and metrics

Question 34

Interest-based bargaining is an effective tool in conflict resolution because:

A)it reduces interest rates for short-term loans
B)it protects the interests of paying clients
C)it maximizes the interests of banks
D)it provides a solution that is in everybody's interests

Question 35

In a Process Decision Program Chart (PDPC), a team leader can break down project components into elements. Each project element is then broken down into _______ and ________.

A)problems; countermeasures
B)internal pressures; external pressures
C)losses; profits
D)debits; credits

Question 36

In an Interrelationship Digraph, a(an) _______ and ______ relationship between two variables is depicted visually.

A)internal; external
B)diversion; conversion
C)cause; effect
D)antecedent; precedent

Question 37

Affinity diagrams allow team leaders to present and display a number of possible answers to open-ended questions. If a team leader wishes to reduce the cycle time of one aspect of production, the following would be possible answers EXCEPT:

A)run more machines
B)use fewer staff members
C)shorten set-up time
D)implement a more efficient control system

Question 38

An example of a planning diagram that shows an interdependence of tasks within a project is a(an):

A)PDPC
B)CPM
C)PERT
D)AND

Question 39

Wilma is a Black Belt practitioner tasked with providing a document that prioritizes process which provides justification for a project. What definition and prioritization tool can be used?

A)affinity diagram
B)financial feasibility chart
C)pareto chart
D)interrelationship digraph

Question 40

Project scope can be limited by the following factors EXCEPT:

A)geography
B)demographics
C)organizational structures
D)ten year financial projects

Question 41

In quality control, the famous business adage is: "If it can't be ____________, it can't be managed"

A)maintained
B)measured
C)scoped
D)evaluated

Question 42

What two metrics in manufacturing are used to calculate cost of process flows?

A)quality and quantity
B)quality and cycle time
C)quantity and cycle time
D)quantity and DPU

Question 43

A Black Belt practitioner leading a team of engineers urges them to devise a statement for their project. A project statement should be SMART. What does the A stand for in this acronym?

A)amendable
B)adjustable
C)accelerated
D)achievable

Question 44

The Define phase is the first phase of Six Sigma's DMAIC cycle. If this phase is not planned for and carried out thoroughly, a project may stall and not transition to other phases successfully. Which of the following statements is well-defined?

A)encourage vendors to pay their invoices on time by threatening legal action
B)improve employee morale by increasing cooperation
C)reduce the reject rate of service B from 30% to 10% within 2 calendar years
D)launch a CEO nationwide recruitment campaign

Question 45

A relationship matrix matches process ________ and _________.

A)inputs; outputs
B)managers; employees
C)divergences; convergences
D)accelerators; decelerators

Question 46

Eastern Batteries Inc. distributes battery products to retailers across the continental United States. Sales managers chart monthly sales of different batteries using:

A)linear regression
B)chi-squares
C)frequency tables
D)multiple regression

Question 47

Business professional are interested in collecting data that can be used to predict future sales or customers' behavior. Parameters are characteristics of a _______ while statistics are characteristics of a ________.

A)sample; survey
B)survey; questionnaire
C)population; sample
D)questionnaire; population

Question 48

Which of the following descriptive statistic uses (?) for a population and (s) for a sample?

A)mean
B)median
C)standard deviation
D)slope

Question 49

A Black Belt practitioner states in a project report that "we are 95% confident that the average age of consumers of Product A are between 34 and 38 years". What does a confidence interval denote?

A)they are 5% confident about the average age of the population
B)they are 95% confident about the average age of the sample
C)they are 5% confident about the average age of the sample
D)they are 95% confident about the average age of the population

Question 50

Weldman Industries conducts a survey which shows that their average production cycle time is 128 minutes with a sampling error of 3 seconds. What does a sampling error result from?

A)making inferences about a large sample
B)making inferences about a large population
C)using a population instead of a sample
D)using a sample instead of a population

Question 51

According to the Central Limit Theorem, regardless of the population from which data is drawn, the sampling distribution of the mean when sufficiently large is:

A)normally distributed
B)abnormally distributed
C)skewed towards the outliers
D)skewed towards the standard deviation

Question 52

A company is choosing between 5 different health plans for their employees. To make a decision, they present the value and characteristics of each health plan in a table also referred to as a(an):

A)pareto chart
B)growth chart
C)contingency table
D)decision matrix

Question 53

A Black Belt practitioner at DuPont Industries uses a process map, SIPOC, in his project. What does the P stand for in this acronym?

A)process
B)product
C)population
D)preliminary

Question 54

A plant manager notices a high variation in output quality from 8 machines within one production cycle. He collects the average defects per total output for each machine per hour. As a variable, output defects is:

A)critical to process
B)critical to quality
C)critical to delivery
D)critical to safety

Question 55

A Black Belt practitioner is commissioned to examine the reason adjustments to common cause variations are not leading to a reduction in variation. She finds that common cause variations are treated as special variations which is also called:

A)norming
B)deviation
C)slacking
D)tampering

Question 56

A special cause variation has the following qualities EXCEPT:

A)a variation in tools
B)is abnormal or unexpected
C)has an assignable cause
D)not inherent in the process

Question 57

Jamieson Inc. produces self-cleaning commercial ovens. In the testing phase of this capability, 20 tests were conducted on the prototype and the results show that 10 consecutive results show process variability that is below the given mean. Is this process in-control or out-of-control?

A)in-control but for this initial testing phase
B)in-control
C)out-of-control
D)not enough information available

Question 58

Process capability (Cp) describes a process, often in a stable manufacturing environment, that leads to the production of a product that conforms to client and design specifications. An ideal process will have a Cp value:

A)greater than one
B)less than one
C)equal to one
D)within one standard deviation of mean

Question 59

RBC Inc. produces rods for construction clients. A client requests metal rods that are 20 inches ± 0.02 inches. The manufacturing process has a sigma of 0.004. What is the process capability (C_P) of this process?

A)2.33
B)1.33
C)1.67
D)2.67

Question 60

Which of the control charts must have at least 20 subgroups of observed values to judge whether a process is in control or not?

A)R-chart
B)C-chart
C)P-chart
D)Y-chart

Question 61

Which of the following is NOT an example of continuous data?

A)temperature in a standard oven
B)amount of money spent on groceries
C)gas mileage in a truck
D)treatment conditions (A or B)

Question 62

Accuracy in data describes how _____ measurements are while precision describes how _____ they are in comparison to actual variation.

A)dispersed; centered
B)centered; dispersed
C)dispersed; varied
D)centered; varied

Question 63

In a measurement system, repeatability means that you are recording variation in a process output such as the amount of time it takes to install bolts to a machine with the same conditions. As part of measurement system variation, repeatability can be thought of as:

A)conditional
B)long-term
C)short-term
D)expected

Question 64

In a simple linear regression line, the rate of change of one variable is measured against another. The resulting equation is listed below. What does the term (b0) stand for?

A)intercept
B)slope
C)random error term
D)known error term

Question 65

A Black Belt practitioner is using preliminary data that correlates a vehicle's weight to its gas mileage. The goal of the study is to predict gas mileage (Y) in liters/40 miles from vehicle weight (X) in tons as seen in the equation below. What is the gas mileage of a car that weighs 2.5 tons? Y_i = 3.5 + 5X_i + 0.025

A)10.025
B)12.025
C)14.025
D)16.025

Question 66

When designing a survey or questionnaire as part of a marketing campaign, the following survey error occurs when an entire group is excluded from participating in the survey and has no chance of being included in the future:

A)non-response bias
B)selection bias
C)discrimination bias
D)urban bias

Question 67

In Six Sigma methodology, critical Xs (or CTx) are important in optimizing the output and proficiency of a business or industrial process. What does CTS stand for?

A)critical to satisfaction
B)critical to supplier
C)critical to sigma
D)critical to schedule

Question 68

A Black Belt practitioner is hired to identify a number of Critical to Price (CTP) factors in an effort to streamline and reduce costs associated with manufacturing Product A. The following are CTP factors EXCEPT:

A)component costs
B)assembly costs
C)shipping costs
D)loan refinancing costs

Question 69

In Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA), a probability score is assigned to the likelihood that current controls in a business or industrial process will become aware of the causes of a failure. What is this FMEA element referred to?

A)probability of occurrence
B)severity of impact
C)likelihood of detection
D)length of delay

Question 70

A Six Sigma practitioner is likely to use advanced quantitative analysis to optimize business or industrial processes. Through process mapping and modeling, the practitioner can match the processes inherent to the project to multiple variables required by requirement or customer needs. This tool is also referred to the:

A)capability-requirements analysis
B)FMEA analysis
C)capability-complexity analysis
D)C&E analysis

Question 71

Which type of statistical analysis requires at least 50 data points in sequence in order to provide inferential capability?

A)multiple regression
B)time-series analysis
C)chi-square
D)linear regression

Question 72

Researchers at a car manufacturing plant are conducting a double-blind, controlled study to compare 2 brake systems. What does double-blind mean in this context?

A)only blind attendants are used
B)special types of blinds are used
C)samples are kept confidential from customers
D)samples are kept confidential from testers

Question 73

The length of training offered to newly hired interns is strongly correlated with their monthly performance sales' figures. With a correlation coefficient of +0.72, this does NOT imply that:

A)training causes high sales' figures
B)training and sales are related in a positive manner
C)training and sales may have a common contributing factor
D)when training increases, sales increase

Question 74

The following are examples of One Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) EXCEPT:

A)F-test
B)Tukey Kramer
C)Levene test for homogeneity of variance
D)Tukey multiple comparison

Question 75

A company of over 13,000 employees conducted a survey and assigned numbers to those employees who have been hired within the previous 5 years (1) and in increments of 5 years from there on. Eight people have been with the company for 20 years. What is the plot below referred to?

A)time-series analysis
B)box plot
C)stem-and-leaf
D)histogram

Question 76

A company's marketing research reveals that in their target customer area, 50% of people are under the age of 39 years while 50% of people make over $80,000 per year. What is this descriptive statistic referred to?

A)average
B)mean
C)mode
D)median

Question 77

Which one of the following descriptive statistics is most affected by an outlier data point?

A)range
B)mean
C)median
D)mode

Question 78

In the coefficient of variation formula below, what does the (S) stand for?

A)sigma
B)standard deviation
C)sum of squares
D)sum of rectangles

Question 79

Jason is a Black Belt practitioner who is commissioned to compare the variations in Stocks A and B. Stock A has an average price of $80 with a standard deviation of $8 while Stock B has an average price of $120 with a standard deviation of $6. What is the variation of both Stocks A and B?

A)8%; 12%
B)10%; 5%
C)5%; 10%
D)8%; 3%

Question 80

Christina is the newest intern hired in the accounting department. According to her high school records, Christina scored a 650 on her math SAT. The mean score and deviation are 450 and 100, respectively. How many standard deviations above the mean did Christina score?

A)4
B)3
C)2
D)1