Long time lurker and learned a lot for those that posted LL's from the pass and fails .

this was my first attempt at the PMP, but i have over 10 years in practical project managment (this was a difficult task for me to switch to the PMI's way of thinking) mainly for the government.

any way the highlight of the exam was the power flickering and rebooting my test machine with 20 minutes left and at question 188.  luckily the rebooted the machine and it came back on at the spot i left off. so i basically got a free 5 minute break.

read rita's 7th edition and andy crowes complete kit. i also used ritas tests (closest to the actual exams way of wording questions, in my opinion ) and then tried the free test from pmstudy and I bought the hard exam from here.   I also used chowdry's notes from here and they were great!!!

RITA and Andy's books were great and i read each twice in depth. then read andy's a third time last week before my exam.   i attempted to memorize all the processes and ITTO's from RITA and page 43, but never worked out for me and was frustrated and about ready to give up. that is when the 3rd read of andy's book i had the "lightbulb" moment and i could visualize all the processes and their logical structure/flow and then the key inputs/tools/outputs...    that is what helped me to pass! 

now on the exam day i had already scouted out the location of the test site the night before. i sat for the exam at 1330 and brought some granola bars and some water.  

i took breaks at around 1 hour (60ish questions done) 2 hours (100 questions done) and at 3 hours and 160 questions done.. then the power outage at 188 and got a free 5 minute break.... the middle break was very needed as i was getting into a rut with not being able to concentrate and actually just clicked on a few answers and wasnt caring if they were correct...     after the break i went back through a dozen questions and actually corrected a few obviously wrong answers.  

i had a lot of the EV, pert, standard deviation questions and my scratch paper sheet i made during the 15 minute intro really helped.

towards the end of the exam i was focused and i also had a string of 20 really easy questions that had obviously right answer and the other 3 options were obviously worng (like they present you with a planning question and only one of the options is in the planning group and the other 3 are in executing)....  

finished the exam with 20 minutes to spare. didn't review anything as i was very confident on my answers and hit sbumit. 

i made a note of the need for a backup power supply in the comments section of the survey and then hit submit ...  the congratulation screen came up and i jumped out of my chair and ran to the test proctor for my exam results sheet... i had 2 P's (int. and plan.) and the rest were MP....