Hello,

 I want to thank all individuals who shared their experiences and lessons learned here. It was a great help in preparing for the exam. I received three proficient and two moderately proficient scores on the exam. Here is the approach I took to pass the exam. Even though I have a number of years in project management, passing an exam takes a whole new meaning which I learned after going through this process. 

Approach:

1.Did some research. settled on RITA's book. After receiving the book, prepared a project plan to read the entire book and do questions at the back.

2.Rita Book - Ist Pass - about 100 hours to read all chapters, on average about 8 hours per chapter, identify what concepts I was familiar with and where the gaps were. The exams at the back, scored four chapters in 80's, three chapters in 70's, four chapters in high 60's. Was confident as I had seen lot of concepts in the real world but sometimes frustated with some answers as they were not practical based on the project mgmt world I lived in but learning through the process. Reading PMBOK at a very high level when going through Rita.

3. Ordered Rita Fast Track PMP Question Bank and Flash Cards.

4.- Rita's book, IInd pass, this time reread the chapter, paying attention to gaps and then do the entire question bank for each knowledge area from RITA fast track question bankl. Difficulty remembering ITTO, sequence of processes and what comes where.

Took about 50 hours to through the entire book this time. All knowledge area questions took 50 hours. Scored five exams in 80's and five exams in early 70's. high level review of PMBOK continues.

- Review all wrong answers from RITA's questions. About 10 hours total, took notes in excel, what was wrong and why it was wrong. Keep doing flash cards to quickly determine the answer and increase speed.

- , I was getting frustated how to tackle ITTO  as I keep making mistakes during practice exams. RITA process chart was good but what really helped me was page 43 in PMBOK. I literally mamorize the entire page 43 and tried to dump it on paper every day. This really trumendously helped as I started to see and think in terms of this framework and place questions and situations into these process area. I feel this was the MOST IMPORTANT thing that helped me.

- I was scoring in 80's in RITA's exam now, was not comfortable as I was seeing questions repeated. Started third reading of RITA along with PMBOK and bought PMstudy 4 exams. First exam scored 69%. I was so mad, I thought I had everthing covered. Covered the gaps again, lot of little details in PMBOK I did not pay attention to , reading PMBOK again every chapter and taking notes about the concepts I did not know. Kept reading chapters in RITA and PMBOK, PMstudy exams scored 78%, 74%, 75%. Felt comfortable now however how much I studied, did not matter at this point as scored will not improve. Always finished practice exams in three half hours...

- Scheduled the exam. Exam Day: Bit of nervousness as kept bothering me why my scores did not improve during the practice exams. dumped all formulas and page 43 on the paper during 15 minutes of prep time. first couple of questions ok but much more wordy than practice exam..some EVM never saw during practice exam and that made me nervous as I was getting the answers matching to the responses. Had to mark about 8 for review out of first 70 odd questions mostly EVM. Halfwway mark about 100 questions and 100 minutes remaining. Quickly started zipping through but never caught up until the end when five minutes were left. Was not sure at this point..pattern exactly like practice exams..two answers always seem to be so close to each other..LESSON LEARNED from practice exma: not much time to ponder and clear the gaps during the exam...go with first instinct..finished and big sigh of releif when learned I passed.

Felt exam was more wordy than practice exams  but as long as familiarly with concetps was there, easy to tackle it. Took all the way to the end as EVM calculations got muddled up which forced me to zip through a lot of questions considering time was flying and I was praying I hope I was right.

Took about 5 months of prep and total of about 275 hours of study. Rita, PMBOK , PMstudy are materials used. Don't feel need anything outside of that to pass. Some EVM questions were really confusing which I would have liked to tackled in a better way which made me nervous during the exam as they took a lot fo time and I just skipped when I could not do anything about them.

Hope it helps others.