First off, Thanks to all the PMZilla contributors that posted lesson learnt after their PMP exam.  I have never been one to contribute to online forums, as I only look to read post from others.  But after passing the PMP exam and visiting this forum a lot these past couple days, I just had to post my lessons learnt for the PMP exam.  I initially took the exam about 15 days ago with only about 2 days of studying and about 4 hours each day.  I skimmed through Chowdary’s notes and Rita’s PDF and thought that with my 10 years of PM experience, I should able to at least meet the minimum requirements.  Man was I WRONG as I only got 4BPs and 1 MP.  I really wanted to have the PMP under my belt and I knew if I didn’t retake it relatively sooner than later, I would eventually just find reasons to not take it. 

I decided to give myself 2 weeks to study and then retake the test.  First week pasts by and no studying occurred, then I started to feel the pressure of the exam date coming. 7 days left, I check out the forums in PMZilla and saw somebody recommend Kim Heldman’s book and O’Reillys Headfirst.  I predominantly used Kim Heldman’s book as the sequencing of the chapters were more practical and followed the criterias of the exam. The chapters are sequenced by the 5 main PM processes of INITIATION-PLANNING-EXECUTION-M&C-CLOSING, which is how your final score is graded.  For clarification on certain topics, O’Reilly was a great reference as it simplified and graphically represented a lot of topics and the PMBOK was a good source for clarification of PM terms. 

After sporadically studying for the remaining 5 days, I only had 24 hours before I had the retake of the exam.  So I decided to work on practice tests, I tried Rita’s Fasttrack V7 once and only scored 40% on the practice test and felt very discouraged.  The questions were pretty wordy and after taking the PMP exam, were significantly much more difficult than what was on the actual exam. I then read on this forum that PMStudy practice tests 3 &4 were pretty good, so I decided to purchase one test at $25.  The test (practice test 4) was much more similar to the actual exam than Rita’s as they were not as lengthy and offered better explanations for their answers.  I did OK on this exam, and I reviewed the questions I got wrong.  Although I think you can Rita’s Fasttrack free online somewhere, I think that PMstudy’s practice test was well worth the $25 as I think it was the main reason why I passed the exam as the questions were similar to the actual test.

Using only these resources, I went into the exam not knowing how I would do.  After a very intense 4 hours, I finally finished and to my surprise, received a score of 4Ps and 1Ps.   Anyways, good luck to all and hope this helps out as the info I believe the postings in this forum contributed to me passing the exam.

One final note, I decided that all the ITTO’s was too much to remember and focused my attention on memorizing all 42 PM processes and just understanding the TTO’s of each process.

Thanks and Good Luck to all!!!!!