Hello Everyone,

I have been a silent observer of this forum to read up on the lessons learnt section of different people to workout a plan that suited me best. To start with I took up a PMP prep course towards the end of 2012 but after that didnt have the time to write the exam soon after the training. Eventually decided to give it a shot in July 2013 before Pmbok 4th edition retires. This was a mistake I made as I tried to hurry up and failed the first attempt. I thought I would still take the PMP exam again at a later point of time but this time I followed Rita 8th edition as my
primary study guide. It took me 1.5 months(early mornings/late nights) to read Rita 3 times. I didnt follow any other material including Pmbok but wouldnt count mine as the best approach. Initially I had planned to complete studies a week before the exam but I could only score 64% on the Rita exam prep. This brought my confidence down so I decided to focus more on reading the
material again than writing more practice exams. Read some more and three days prior to the exam , I took the Oliver 75 question test to score only
60% on it. Skimmed through Rita again for Risk and Procurement chapters the day before the exam. Read Abhishek's notes and Raga's 355 points in the morning before the exam.

During the exam , I was tired due to lack of sleep so couldnt concentrate too well during the first few questions but as I took more questions, I got
more confident about completing it in 4 hours. There were many questions on Risk Management. Many on Change. The Math questions were mostly straightforward but if any question took more than 1.5 minutes I decided to choose an answer , mark for review and move forward. Sometimes it made sense to read the question first before reading the entire situation presented in the question. Most questions were situational with very few straightforward ITTO ones(Glad I didnt try memorizing any of them!). At the end of it, I saw a congratulations screen and my score card showed 1 Proficient , 2 Moderately Proficient and 2 Below Proficient!  I guess I just passed it by an inch but its time for me to celebrate :)

Thank you Pmzilla!

Regards,
Mansur