Hi all, 

Just passed my PMP exam with 4 MP and 1 P.

My first post here at PMZilla. I want to share my whole PMP experience with everyone. I started my PMP journey in April 2012. I enrolled in the RMC project management online course (valid for 6 months). Being a huge slacker, I didn't really bother going through the contents until September. I then started putting my hours into the PMI website. However, I got slammed with an audit. That caused some major delays as I had to get signoff from managers and project sponsors. I finally cleared the audit process at the end of October. (Keep in mind, I didn't do any studying in Sept - Oct as I was expecting to write the exam right in September). I scheduled my exam for Nov 20th. 

At this point, I have lost my access to RMC (6 months expired). I started to panick because I didn't want to pay more money to get access to the material again. I also took minimal notes when going throw the RMC online course. At this point, I turned to the internet. Good thing I did because I found a whole community of PMP study guides and practice exams. With three weeks left, I started cramming like mad. My initial approach was to do as many sample exams as possible. Luckily I was able to go over around 800 questions from various different websites (all free). However, what I found was that these exam questions all varied in degree of difficulty and could prove to be misleading when it comes to writing the actual exam. I was scoring anywhere from 60% to 85%. 

I spent about 1.5 hours a night during the second week leading up to the exam working on practice questions. In the last week, I spent on average 3 hours a night doing questions. And then finally, 3 days before the exam date, I started going through the forum and look at people's feedback and results for their exam. It actually started to scare me because most people spent way more time on studying. However, the one thing that proved to be the difference maker for me on the last 3 days of cramming was the spreadsheet file from Rajesh Nair - It was the most useful document for me. All key points are highlighted. Oh, and one last thing I did leading up to the exam was memorizing all of the processes. Don't bother trying to memorize the ITTO (it's impossible). Just make sure you can recognize all the ITTO terms when you see it. 

I think I would have failed the exam if it wasn't for Rajesh's spreadsheet. The easiest questions on the exam are definitely the calculation questions. Good luck on your exam!!!