Hi All,

I passed my PMP exam on my first try today! I wanted to give back to this forum as other member's posts have helped me considerably during my preparation.

Study Plan:

Duration: 5 weeks (full time)

Books: PMBOK (including the glossary), Head First PMP

Practice Test taken: Rita fastrack, Tutorialspoint, PMstudycom (free), Oliverlehmann

Exam prep strategy:

Started off with Head First to give me a good introduction to PMP. I liked their simple style a lot. After I finished that book, I went on to read the PMBOK guide. Then I spent quite a number of days doing practice questions to further help me to discover and understanding gaps after reading the books. (This was very important for me and I took notes of lessons learnt after every practice test).

I was scoring ~70-80% in my practice test during this period.

My next phase of studying included reading through the whole PMBOK guide again. This helped me to pick up on any missed concepts. I then spent the remainder of my time doing more practice questions.

Two days before the exam, I realised that I still didnt know the inputs and tools very well and could not derive them on the fly. So I decided to buy the ITTO explorer from brainbok.com and used it to quickly target the processes which had more complicated inputs and tools. (Outputs usually can be derived).

I then developed my own cheat sheet of difficult to remember tools for Scope, Time, Cost, Quality and Risk processes. I only focused on these areas as I did not think I could memorise everything. I also made sure to memorise the full list of 42 processes in the matrix form (knowledge area vs process group)

Exam strategy:

I did a brain dump of the 42 processes and the tools which i memorised during hte first 15 mins. The process matrix was a good reference for me during some questions in the exam. (After doing so many questions, you get tired and sometimes forget some of the basics so have a reference was helpful).

My comments on the exam:

It was simpler than expected. I found the questions in the Rita bank to be more challenging and confusing. The exam had about 50% short questions and 50% longer scenario based questions. I took about 3h 20mins to complete the whole exam with a 5 min break at the 100 question mark. I took 1h 30 mins for the first 100 questions and started to get a little tired for the next 100. It really is quite a long and tiring exam....pace yourself.

One more thing I noticed is that there were not many ethics questions...maybe this is a result of the new format from last year?

Without a whole lot of scenario questions, you should actually be able to get through fairly quickly. Rita's questions really freaked me out because the first time I tried the SuperPMP exam, I took the full 4 hours which was really draining.

Anyways, that's about all I have to share. As other have said, everyone has their own strategies for studying, so do what works best for you.

Hope this is of a little help to others out there.

Good luck!

Cheers....