I'm sorry to know about your result. With such preparation and being agile practioner before as you indicated, you are at least very close and I beileive your second shot will not be hard at all.
Here are few tips I wish it could help:
- Be ensured that the boundary between pass and fail is too thin and is easily crossable. Failing the exam is not necessarily an indication of disqualification. In contrast, The exam, in a way, is a techniques driven and time management based. This means even a senior agile coach still has to acquire the key to pass the exam.
- It is better NOT to do both handbook and simulator from the same source. There is always a different angel to look at your target through and still all of them are right. In my case, I read Mike Griffith book and did Prepcast simulator. Both were rich and beneficial but combining them together was a key reason to comprehensively understand exam author's mindset.
- I would recommend you to get your focus on the 4 values and 12 principles by investing most of your preparation effort and time in trying to ingrain, absorb and understand them but more importantly on how to practically use them and putting them in the right context. And then any relevant tool or technique you come across afterward, you just correlate each of them back to its corresponding agile principle, rather than digging further in the tool’s attributs and parameters. The exam doesn't test your knowledge of the tools and techniques themselves but where to put them in the big picture.
- Since you started to invest in obtaining the PMI-ACP certificate, don't wait long before doing your second try. The longer you wait the more recaps to do all over.
Good luck and never let this turn down your ambition !
