All,

Just wanted to give a warning for a recent experience I had at Prometric - Houston.  I signed up for a Test Drive with Prometric last week to get rid of any potential jitters I might get before my exam in June.  This is highly recommended to get a feel of what you will need to do during your exam date.  I was worried about a lot of little things since I didn’t know what qualified as a "special need" come exam day.  I was relieved to find out that a calculator can be provided to you if requested.  If preferred, then you can use the one on the computer.  Something about having a physical calculator in my hands during an exam helps me out a lot.  I also found out that I would be given pencil and paper, and not a dry erase board w/ marker.  This too helped me calm down for the test since I’m a pencil and paper kind of guy.  There are headphones available upon request that muffle out noises.  I put these on during my test drive and was quite pleased then I couldn't hear anything but my own thoughts.  Again, I thought all of these small things would qualify as a “special needs,” but they are available to anyone.

However, I'm going to warn you about the data dumping during the 15 min. test tutorial.  A lot of the material I have been studying say to use the 15 min. tutorial as your time to dump data onto a sheet of paper for notes, formulas, etc.  I asked the test proctor about this and she said according to the guidelines she received from PMI (she showed this to me), no note taking is allowed unless it's under the actual test timer (the 4 hour timer).

I just wanted to share this with everyone.