Hi Kevin,

When I introduced threading, I limited the threading to 3 nested comments, so that’s why you don’t see the reply function.

I totally understand not having concrete information about what’s on the exam and what’s not and I wasn’t trying to sneak any confidential information. Thank you for sharing your own experience in preparing for similar exams as that context helps a lot.

But I think part of what makes this difficult is that there is a lot of ambiguity about where the standard is set in terms of the bar of knowledge required to be a CBAP. I keep thinking back to my college days. I nearly always had a good understanding of what I needed to know and a clear expectation as to what types of questions would be on an exam and this allowed me to prepare effectively. This was the case even though my course of study involved much more in the way of essay than of multiple choice.

But that standard doesn’t seem to exist for the CBAP and maybe it’s common that it doesn’t exist for any professional certification. I don’t know. In the absence of this publicly available standard, the training companies are able (or really forced) to create their own standard against which we CBAP-preparers can use to judge our readiness. I think we also find a lot of people relying on here say, which I see I’m now adding more of to the mix, though that definitely wasn’t my intention when starting this series of posts.

My first phase of study did definitely involve understanding the logic of the BABOK, but as I took the sample exams I realized this was not enough. Or maybe the reality is that there is some BABOK logic that just isn’t internalizing, so I start to sway over towards memorization instead. This is definitely true with the small subset of techniques I haven’t used (for example, the crowfoot notation is especially onerous to me as I can’t find the internal logic of it) and in a lot of the inputs to specific tasks (I think because my experience has blended a lot of the tasks together).

Laura,

For some reason I can’t reply to your reply, so…

Honestly, I can’t tell you whether there is a question on the exam that relates to this or not. Access to exam questions is limited internally to those who need to see them and I, well, don’t. There are questions that test basic terminology and content, as well as questions that test higher-order thinking and analysis skills. But I honestly can’t tell you whether a question on any particular topic is or is not on the exam. As far as third party practice exams go, what I can say is that most of them are not written by people who’ve had the training exam writers get and the questions certainly haven’t been reviewed as carefully. IIBA constantly reviews our exam questions against actual results to help determine whether questions are truly effective from a certification perspective.

If I take off my IIBA hat for a moment, and go back to my experiences writing the PMP and OCEB exams, I suspect that understanding the logo behind the BABOK Guide will serve you better than raw memorization. For example, let’s say you’re faced with a question about what inputs are required to perform a given task. When we wrote the BABOK Guide, we tried to make sure that the listed inputs were all things that you can’t actually perform the task if you don’t have, not things that were nice to have. For me, at least, there always does come a point where further study produces sharply diminishing returns, and I usually take that as a sign that I’m as ready as I’m going to get to write the exam.

No doubt my parenthood experience will cause me to eat my words on some level. Though applying the intellectualism that drove me to business analysis as a profession in the first place to parenthood is proving to be an invaluable learning experience about the world at large.

But thanks very much for the vote of confidence, Kevin.

In relation to this specific question, I suppose the root issue is whether or not it is necessary for a BA sitting for the CBAP to be able to recall the different meanings of requirements validation vs. requirements verification in order to successfully answer a question on the exam. I just double-checked the CBAP handbook and it really doesn’t give enough detail to make an assumption one way or the other. Though the reference to Bloom’s taxonomy, one element of which is “Knowledge of specifics – terminology, specific facts” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy) I would guess that I need to know it and remember it.

The exam simulators have been helpful as they help me see where my recall is weak and needs to be bolstered. Of course, I won’t be able to judge them against the actual exam until I’ve taken it.

Kevin, is there another resource I should be referencing to make decisions about what level of preparation is appropriate or necessary?