Student Profile: Prasenjit Shome, PMP

I am an IT professional and work for Cognizant Technologies and am designated as Manager-Projects. I am currently engaged in Banking and Financial sector for more than 10 years. I have completed multiple project deliveries while in India and now in the USA and have led team sizes up to 20 people and have been instrumental in handling multi-location project set-up and bring them to BAU modes with my primary role as technology project manager and lead.

I passed the exam on Nov 9,2015. I had used the prepcast and listened to it whenever I got time - while driving home from work, waiting for my sons various classes and virtually whenever I got a chance. This made me familiar with the material. Then I completed reading Rita Mulcahy twice and still I was not really feeling confident about the exam.

Then I took my wife's (who has always been better at preparing for exams and academics than me - admitting it here) - I started taking the questions - answer approach. I started mixing up the topics and stated giving myself mock tests that made me realize the concepts which I was getting mixed up with and then listed down my gaps in knowledge.

I used the prep-cast exam questions and Rita's questions to build my mock tests. They were very helpful. I also used some others from the internet but they were not as close to the actual exam questions.

I again read Mulcahy to cover my gaps and then started to time my tests since I came to know this is also going to be a pressure test as well. whenever I was on the move I used to listen parts of the Prepcast again. I realized I was getting overwhelmed with the 4hr and 200 questions concept - so I fooled myself and broke the test in 50 questions with 1 hour slots which I tried to complete as quickly as possible and recorded how much time I was able to save from that one hour slot. I planned to use this saved time for revisiting time consuming questions and questions which required diagrams like the critical path problems.

I realized whatever time I could save in the each 1 hour slot I could use that for the questions which I would decide to mark and come back later. I realized the crtical path questions and the ones which needed some calculations usually took more than a min to answer and hence best to mark off for attending after the first pass of all the questions.

On the exam day also I planned to use the same strategy. The exam has two buttons 'Marked questions' and 'Skipped Questions'- I needed a third "Questions to attempt after the first pass' I actually wrote down the question numbers which I surely wanted to come back to after my first pass of 200 questions. Then I went to the skipped questions and finally the marked questions. This technique helped me spend the right amount of time for the questions in really wanted to go back to and spend the saved time on.

I want to highlight this strategy more so that you can appreciate this.
A marked question is usually a question which you have answered but want to give a second look at.
A skipped question includes the ones which you have no clue about. ( and believe me you will have many)
The 'noted down' questions were the ones which I have not attempted since I knew they would take more than a minute to answer. I wanted to attack them first. Hence I built the list.

I was delighted the strategy worked and I passed.

Prasenjit Shome, PMP