Super excited while writing this post... passed the dreaded PMP exam today evening.

Here is how I prepared for the exam. Hope it helps you all...

applied for and got approved (without audit) in march 2014...booked the exam in september 2014 giving me exactly 2 months to prepare (till nov 2014)...

i didnt use the full 2 months as i am working full time..i started exactly 1 month before the exam..started with pmbok 5.0.... read first 10-15 pages but found it boring...i had heard good reviews about Rita Mulachy book from friends who had passed PMP so thought of first starting with that and then coming back to PMBOK.. Started with rita's book... read it casually once (in the evenings after work roughly 2-3 hour everyday) in the first 17 days...i did do the excercises at the end of the chapters at this time and scored 68% overall average across all chapters..i did not look at answers or their explanations at this time.

Now i took the last 2 weeks as vacation from office and started preparing full time. Re -read rita's books and did the exercises .. read the explanations now which made a lot of sense... now i scored 78% overall average across all chapters. i also made notes during this time.

now read through my notes and brushed through rita's book the 3 time and it all was making sense.... now i thought of going through pmbok but i didnt have much time as the exam was in less than a week.. SO I skipped PMBOK...I thought i better focus on questions....

i went through all the questions at the end chapters of Andy Crowe's book and score 75%...Gave the final exam at the end of his book and score 88%.. my personal take is that these questions were too easy...the questions from rita's book were of decent standard..

then i went through some sample questions on preparepm website, gave the 2 mock tests in PMP training kit by Whitaker. I also did the sample questions on the book PMP Project Management Professional exam by Heldman ( i dont think these were of any help).

I studied hard for the last 2 weeks around 14 hours a day...slept, ate and studied.

Here is my take on the exam

1. The exam was had very good quality questions.. They were all conceptual except very few which were straight.
2. I found myself struggling in the first 2 hours... some questions were tough.. also all of them required you to think hard and apply the concepts.. I had answered around 90 questions at the end of first 2 hours...
3. None of the sample questions I had done in the books i mentioned (except Rita’s) matched that level of quality which was in the exam.
4. I didnt have many long wordy questions as i have heard people complain about
5. None of the 200 questions had wording like “all But” “Except”... all were straight forwardly asking the correct choice but the choices were hard or you had to think through the questions really hard.

I passed finally but here is my take on it all

1. Start early so that you dont struggle as I did.
2. Do lots of timed tests. This is where I lacked . This will help you check how you are doing on the time front.
3. Dont rely on the questions in the books or the free internet stuff.. They are after all free..i found most of them to be very straightforward.. i will suggest getting rita’s cd... i have heard from people it is good...based upon my experience with her book.. i think the cd might be worth the investment.
4. Make notes.. i think mine helped me a lot
5. I am not sure if you need to read pmbok to pass .. I have not read it so cannot comment.. rita’s book was good enough for me to understand the concepts..

That’s it folks .. good luck with the prep.. let me know if you need any material or other info