Hello everyone, i recently passed pmp on 26^th august...I have few terrible experiences to share with you...first i start with my study plan, i prepared for almost 5-6 weeks with more concentrated studies during the last 10 days...I only studied 2 books; rita Malcahy and PMBOK both 4^th editions...As regards mocks, i only preferred to choose high quality mock tests..15 days before exam, I took PMP fast track and scored 70.6%...7 days before exam i took Lehman75 and scored 68%, 5 days before exam i took Lehman 175 and scored 67.4%..in this test i retook the wrong questions and my percentage improved by 20% which clearly showed that I was having a big problem with retaining my concentration during the exam...i tried to fulfil this deficiency and 2 days before exam took PM-study-1 about which people say that its closest to the real exam..With full concentration i was able to score 79.43% which was a big relief for me as i started to feel more confident.

On exam day, I reached exam centre one hour before the exam time(that was in Medinah, Saudi Arabia)...I was surprised to see that the portion of the building comprising of prometric center was locked and someone told me that the concerned person will come only at 8.30AM as my exam was scheduled at 9.00am. So I waited in the nearby room which was some teaching centre. At 8.35am the man who was supposed to conduct my exam stepped in...After checking my ids he asked me to submit every single thing in my possession and told me that i was only allowed a break for washroom and not for eating or drinking..That was just shocking to me as i have followed people who had had breaks for drinks etc...Anyway he gave me just 2 paper sheets and told me any additional sheets will be only provided when the given sheets are exhausted, after a while he started tutorial...when i started writing formulae and pg 43 table, he stopped me and asked me to first finish reading tutorial and in this process he spoiled my 5-6 minutes..After i just hurriedly passed through the tutorial i tried to write all formulae and charts etc but couldn’t finish everything that i wanted to..

About the real test, i read many people views that about 60-70 questions are tough and remaining are moderately difficult and some are very straight forward...From question one to 100, I hardly spotted 10-15 questions where i  was actually sure of the answers..such was the difficulty level of the test..and i was infact anticipating a bit easier questions after 100 which unfortunately didn’t happen except in some small patches where there were few straight forward questions...In the mean time the exam attendant came to me and started warning that while reading the questions my lips were moving that was not allowed...In fact I’m in the habit of silently moving my lips when i read something...he warned me that he would cancel my test if he again spotted me moving my lips...the impact of his warning was such that i eventually lost all my concentration from the exam as his warning words kept on spinning in my head for quite a while..then again came another shock, when i asked him to provide me another sheet as my last sheet was finished, he asked me to first submit my previous sheet which i refused and he wasted my 2-3 minutes making this argument and finally he allowed me to keep my previous sheet pretty reluctantly...the most terrible thing was the difficulty level of exam was continuously increasing with long wordy situational questions and lengthy mathematical questions where no simple calculations were involved...I hardly found a COUPLE of EVM questions where calculations were simple,,,rest were loaded with heavy calculations..same was the case with network diagrams..ITTOs questions were about 10-12 and it seemed that the most difficult portions of ITTOs were chosen which mostly comprised of common and confusing ITTOs..When i finished the test i was just 50% confident of clearing it and fortunately i managed to get over the line...it’s also pertinent to mention that i had made some codes for common ITTOs which helped me to solve those questions and without them there would surely have been curtains for me

Overall the exam was very difficult, much more than Lehman’s tests and yes that Pmstudy test was nowhere near to the real pmp exam as far as the difficulty level is concerned. It clearly seemed to me that the exam was specially designed to kill the exam taker and with the attitude of that stupid exam attendant, i thought PMI was doing everything possible to kill me...from all this experience i conclude that the difficulty of pmp exam is highly variable and it’s just your luck what do you get on your day...I mentioned all my experiences to aware the future exam takers to get ready for the worst...thankfully my exam is over but it has left some terrible thoughts. (there're some other users' posts who took the exam the same day as I did and coudnt get through..the surprising thing is that we had the same questions on exam and difficulty level was very high, so its kinda warning sign for the future test takers to be fully aware of it)

Regards