Sitting for the Certified Reliability Engineer exam on July 14th and trying to nail down my study plan. I've been working through the ASQ CRE Primer and past exam questions, averaging about 2 hours a day for three weeks. My background is in manufacturing quality so I'm comfortable with statistical methods, but some of the reliability modeling topics feel genuinely foreign to me.
The Weibull analysis section is killing me. I understand the concept but when I hit calculation questions on practice exams I'm losing 15-20% of those points. I'm also weak on maintainability and human factors, which I don't encounter much in my day job. The exam is open-book, which helps, but the time pressure means you can't rely on looking everything up.
I've heard the actual exam is harder than the primer makes it seem. Is there supplemental material worth investing in, or should I just drill more practice questions from here? I'd love to hear from anyone who passed recently about which areas showed up most heavily.
Open-book sounds like a safety net but it really isn't — I wasted 8 minutes on one question flipping through my tabbed reference and it cost me two questions I didn't get to. Tab your reference binder obsessively before exam day.
I passed first attempt with a 76%. Spent my last two weeks focused entirely on FMEA, fault tree analysis, and Weibull since those showed up constantly. Human factors was lighter than expected but don't skip it entirely.
The ASQ primer is solid but not enough on its own for Weibull. I used the ReliaSoft textbook as a supplement specifically for that chapter and my score on reliability modeling went from about 60% to 85% on practice sets. Worth the extra read.
Appreciate everyone sharing their experience here. I'm 4 weeks out from my CRE exam date and feeling more confident after reading this. The consensus on exam prep being the hardest section matches what I'm seeing in my practice scores — going to put extra time there this week.
Great discussion here. One thing I'd add that hasn't come up: sleep the night before is genuinely more important than one more study session. I went in fully rested for my CRE and felt sharper on the practice test questions than I expected. Don't underestimate recovery time.