I passed PMP recently this month i.e. December 2011. I did not refer any suggested books nor did I concentrate on so called “PMP Simulations test” much. I did read PMBOK 2 times. I am also doing research in Psychology along with my IT Management. After passing PMP I tried to look back PMI information that has been published on their website. Somewhere I read that PMP questions have huge impacts on “psychometric analysis”, I believe the same now. Its not what you feel is true i.e. study and exam, your passing might have a different reason.

To my knowledge these are the facts about PMP:

1. 90% of PMP questions are situational i.e. your understanding of real life project management and how you link inputs, tools & technologies and output with PMP written processes. No books can explain you these.

2. PMI does not reveal its question and answer, so while going thought any trusted books/test you actually trust the writer who wrote and not really what PMI expects.

3. In case you fail, you will never know what mistake you did…PMI does not reveal your mistakes for the questions you attempted.

4. In majority of questions ALL answers are correct, you need to choose the best one. In short you don’t have a choice to ignore wrong answer.

With this said so, in reality you pass PMP because:

1. It was good day for you and you did not have severe headache during the long test of 4 hours.

2. Your common sense worked. Most of the time it does not!

3. You tried to relate your project management experiences and tried to best guess the best answer.

4. This one actually is true for majority of the people (and they don’t know) – You actually gave up just after answering first 20 questions. Once you decided that you would fail, you just answered without using your brain quickly to finish off and see fail result. But you actually passed! Biggest unexpected happy shock of life! Why this happened? Here is the answer - When you decided that you have already failed, your fear factor went away. A failed person has nothing to loose and hence your relax/relieved mind helped your hand to choose the right answer (you did not even know this).

I wish you all the best to the all PMP aspirants.