With the grace of God and support from my family & wife, I have passed by PMP on 20 June 2012 with “Proficient” in all except Closing (“MP”). I was the silent observer of this community and learnt a lot, especially from the LL’s of others.

I had prepared for 3 months for PMP and started my preparation on 3^rd week of March with online training from PMChamp.com, The Course helped me in getting the overview & insight of the subject & also required 35 Contact hours for PMP application.

I studied PMBOK thrice, Headfirst once and Rita’s book once. Headfirst is very good book and should be referred for the understanding of concepts required for the exam (specially way of calculating float without calculating ES,EF,LS,LF by forward and backward pass).In my view Rita’s book is must for PMP because it develops way of thinking and approach to tackle scenario based questions. Last but not in any ways least is the PMBOK which is a bible for the exam and should be read word to word and one should be comfortable with the entire text (including Glossary).

Now about Mock questions & exams, In Rita’s chapter end questions I used to score in the range of 75 to 85%. My scores in other mocks are as follows:

Oliver Lehmann – 75Q - 71% (Overall difficulty more than actual exam)

PMPForSure – 50Q - 72%

SkillSign – 50Q - 76%

PMStudy Free – 200Q - 81 %

Simplilearn - 200Q - 82%

PM Fast Trac V7 - PMP - 85%

PMZilla Final PMP 200Q - 70% (Tougher than actual PMP exam)

PMZilla Final PMP 75Q - 69.33% (Tougher than actual PMP exam)

Farndales 262Q - 82% (Avg. around 80% in all the sections) – Very good concept based questions found to be closer to PMP exam

PMPFor Sure Paid (100Q) - 87% (Then I stopped giving mocks, 3 days before the exam)

 

Actual PMP exam was 90% scenario based, not tough, not easy either and would overall rate as Moderate to Easy. There were all kinds of questions, one liner, 2 to 3 liner, also 10 liner, numericals, graphs based Questions and also some but very few very difficult questions. Numericals does not require any complex calculations and most can be solved without even using paper and pen. I would say Tools & Techniques are very important and should be remembered (I used mnemonics’ for memorization). I did not memorize Inputs, Outputs but have the good understanding of them and could able to figure out from the options in the questions. Questions were from each and every knowledge areas & sections but majority of the questions was touching scope, quality, risk and procurement areas. I was about to finish the first round visit of the 200 Qs in 2:15 hrs with around 50 doubtful Qs marked for review. Then I did the reviewed questions in next 45 minutes. Then I had  around 1 hr  which I had used to cross check each and every answer, it also resulted me correcting around 4 to 5 Qs which I had wrongly marked in the first time because of missing some relevant information. With 10 sec remaining I pressed the submit button and after few minutes with survey in between I had seen the congratulations on my screen J

 

My final say about PMP exam is, it can be easily cracked provided one should have proper understanding of the concepts pertaining to each section in PMBOK.

 

Congratulations to all PMP holders and All the best to all PMP Aspirants.

 

Thanks,

Pranab, PMP