Passed the exam yesterday on the first attempt.

I had started reading back in March and was intending to sit for the exam before end of June on the 3rd edition. But around May, my employer decided to fund an exam prep course and all the courses at that time were based on 4th edition due to the change. So I ended up reading Andy's book (based on 3rd edition) and then got my hands onto softcopy of PMBOK 4th edition from the PMI site. I found the new PMBOK much better written and organised than the 3rd and used that for the remainder of the preparation. I may have felt that as I had read Andy's book already and was familiar with the concepts.

I read PMBOK twice before the prep course last week and the course help me reenforce my learnings and build my confidence. The 5 day course assumed that you had already prepared for the course and it was not intended to explain you each topic in detail but did offer a lot of practice questions. It worked out well for me as I was already prepared and was doing the course only because my employer offered that but that was not the case for others in the class who thought the course will teach various topics in details. Inthe practice test i used to score around 75-80% depending on the difficulty level of the exam. I also did the 200 test questions from Andy's book based on 4th edition and scored the same %. I wanted to do the Oliver Lehman questions as suggested on this site but didnt got a chance.

The exam - I reached 45 mins earlier and was offered to sit the exam early...followed the drill to put my things into a locker...btw every single inch of the test center was under video surveillance. The actual exam...I did the tutorial and finished it in about 3 minutes...and then onto writing the formulas, etc. Strangely i did not had many formulas to remember as compared to what I had heard on this forum so was wondering if I had the complete list of formulas with me but what I had was sufficient for the exam.My strategy was to go through all questions as quickly as possible and then come back to do the review..I finished 200 questions in 2 hours; 45 mins and had 80 questions to review.....and I got a bit worried as others had about 50 questions for reviewbut was ok as I was being over cautious. Managed to review the 80 questions with 10 mins to spare. I found about 25 questions where i had narrowed it down to 2 choices but wasnt able to pick the right one with confidence. I came across about 5 questions that were not directly from the PMBOK. I also came across two network diagrams that were Activity on Arrow type...even though they have been removed from 4th edition of PMBOK. Strangely enough I also got the same question described by someone else on a different thread about reward system creating conflicts in the team...I wished i had gone through the discussions on that question on the other thread but was able to work out the correct answer(I believe). When I clicked end button the computer HDD went crazy and was making such a loud grinding noise that I thought its going to die soon...and then onto survey and then results.

One thing I am not sure about it the benchmarks being used for the results...I got proficient in all areas except professional responsibility area where i got moderately proficient. Does anyone know the numbers behind this categories? I would love to know how many I got wrong....

Good luck to the rest.