I passed the PMP exam May 1st with P's on all Process Groups except ‘Closing’ which was BP. I would like to share my preparation experience.

I did a slightly longer prep plan of four months. I used the following books: Rita’s 8^th edition and PMBOK Guide. I first started with Rita and studied each chapter thoroughly and also taking the end-of-chapter practice questions. After the first go-through I started the next iteration this time with two/three chapters at a time. This helped with digesting the concepts from across KAs and also provided big picture view. Along the way I got myself familiar with the structure of the PMBOK guide. I also took plenty of chapter-wise sample questions from many websites to test my understanding. It is not only enough to do the sample online questions but also to review the answers and the rationale. Sometimes the rationale provided might be contrary to your understanding. I always went back to Rita or PMBOK guide and clarified the correct concept.

Once I felt comfortable with the concepts and material, I went online and searched for forums to get an idea about the actual exam experience. PMZilla was one of the best places to get a good feel about actual user experiences both regarding study plan and exam day experience. I scheduled the PMP exam about four weeks out to give me enough time to take practice tests and fine tune the last leg of preparation. I did the following mock tests/practice exams:

• Oliver Lehmann: Both 75 questions and 175 questions
• Head First Labs – O’Reilly (free simulated 4-hr 200 questions)
• PMstudy.com free practice test #1 (200 Questions)
• Chris Scordo PMP Exam Prep – PMI Website – Mock Exam #1 (50 Questions)
• Chris Scordo PMP Exam Prep – PMI Website – Mock Exam #3, 4, 5 & 6 (200 Questions)
• PMzilla Final PMP Exam Paid (tough 200 and 100 bonus questions)
• PMSTUDY.COM Paid Test #2 (200 Questions)
• Chris Scordo PMP Exam Prep – PMI Website – Mock Exam #15, 16, 17 & 18 (200 Questions)
• PMSTUDY.COM Paid Test #3 (200 Questions)
• PMSTUDY.COM Paid Test #4 (200 Questions)

Typically I scored in the 75-85% range on the above tests. Oliver and PMZilla were the toughest and Scordo was the easiest. Like I mentioned before, the tests exposed some gaps in my understanding and I went back to the two books and corrected my calibration. For example in some tests there was heavy focus on difference between project records, project documents and project files. The relevant references from PMBOK Guide Glossary helped clear that up. Borrowing from Rita’s book “It is always better to find your knowledge gaps and rectify it before the gaps find you in the main exam.”

During the last week, I just fine tuned some problem areas and I read a lot about exam experiences and brain dumps etc., as I felt I couldn’t study much because I was already saturated with so much information. My brain dump was the process charts from Rita’s book which I had memorized. My advice on prepping for brain dumps is, it depends on the person. Formulae were never an issue for me so I didn’t have to write them down. Rita’s process chart especially the planning group in which steps are actually sequential always provided me with a roadmap. That is the only info I used on my scratch paper in the main exam.

Exam day experience was pretty smooth and boring. After I was shown to my testing desk I stated the tutorial and spent couple minutes browsing through it. Then I drew the process map in my scratch paper as my brain dump. May be a formula or two. I don’t think I used any of that information during the exam. The questions were neither easy nor tough. They were designed to test your understanding of the concepts. I didn’t get a lot of ITTOs in my exam. Decent amount of EVM questions. May be about 25% were direct questions for which you know the answer as soon as you read the question. Personally, I didn’t know if my answers were correct for about a third of my answers. In that way I think the exam was designed extremely well. I marked about a dozen of my answers. I had about 20 minutes left after I finished all 200. I went back and reviewed the marked ones. I finally submitted my exam with 7 minutes still left. I was very anxious when I skipped the survey and tick tick tick …. I saw the results. PASS with 4Ps and 1 BP.

One last word of advice: Prepare hard and take plenty of sample tests, always use the test results as means of circling back to your study material and clarify/correct/validate your understanding. Don’t worry too much about ITTOs, formulae or brain dump; those things will fall in place. Trust your preparation. Good Luck fellow PMP preparers.