Hi all,

My name is Shahbaz and I successfully passed the PMP exam on my first try on Aug 10th, 2010 in Riyadh Saudi Arabia.

The materials I used were as follows:

Rita Mulcahy latest edition, Head First latest edition, PMBok and did glanced through Kim Heldman book and tried the questions.

Even though it took me over a year to finally put everything together, I studied consistently for about 3 months, about 4 hours everyday and that did the trick.  Rita's book is good but I do feel the tone can be intimidating and that she makes the exam out to be more difficult than it actually is!  That is just my observation and others might disagree.  The questions in the book and the PMfastrack SW are good, and probably a bit more tough than the actual exam, so good practice.

Head first is a good book to get since the concepts are explained in a more clear manner.  But the questions in that book are much easier than the exam.  I'd recommend head first for the Cost and Time chapter in particular, since it explains Critical Path/Float and the EV calculations in a very nice easy way.  

I didn't actually read the Kim Heldman book but did try most of the questions at the end of the chapter.  Do not get discouraged if you score low on those, they are difficult and imo more difficult than the actual exam questions.

The thing that helped me the most I'd say are the pmstudy.com 4 practice exams.  I highly recommend that everyone attempting the PMP get them and try them before the exams.  They are VERY CLOSE to the actual exam, and the best preparation imo.  And only 50 bucks, a great investment.  Rita's PMFastrack SW is over priced IMO, and the questions in the book are repeated in the SW so it's not like you get totally new questions.

I did read PMBok about 3 times but it was hard for me to grasp thoroughly, although it did start to make more sense once I had read Rita's book a few times.  If you take the pmstudy.com exams, you'll notice that they are heavily based on PMBok, and the exam is like that too.  So you MUST study the PMBok thoroughly.  Personally I tried to memorize the ITTO but couldn't do it, but do try.  Also make sure you go through the glossary at the end of the book.

Overall, do as many practice questions as possible so you get an idea of the PMI way of thinking in answering situational questions like 3 correct answers.  As time went by, I felt I got better and better at choosing the BEST answer...it takes practice.

Overall, don't believe people that say the exam is VERY HARD.  It is not.  I was well prepared and to be honest, it wasn't as difficult as I was expecting.  There were A LOT of simple give away questions.  The questions that required calculations were VERY EASY.  I think I got all of them right.

Lastly, my question is the following:

I scored PROFICIENT in 3 Domains and MODERATELY PROFICIENT on the other 3 Domains.  Since PMI doesn't tell you the percentage of your score, how can one interpret this score?  I've noticed that people who got BELOW PROFICIENT in a few Domains also passed.  So can I assume with my score that I scored somewhere in the 70's percentage wise?

Best of luck to everyone.

Shahbaz Kadir Dakhan, PMP