I passed my PMI-ACP with all area AT today and therefore I would like to share the experiences.
(Honestly I didn't expect that since my best effort in Practise Exam was 6AT 1T)
1. Fulfilling PDU requirement
Used Joseph Phillips's PMI-ACP Exam Prep Success.
(
www.udemy.com/course/pmiacp_21pdus/
)
It helps me to obtain the general understanding of all 7 exam domains when combined with your working experiences.
The video and slides are useful for basic understandings.
For the course end exam, it is not that useful since most of questions are of fact recall
(It may be useful in helping the memorising and understanding).
2. Readings
a. PMI-ACP® Exam Prep, Updated Second Edition (Mike Griffiths)
If you have time, you should read it at least once. This book is very useful, not only for exams.
And you should definitely go through the questions after the end of each chapters in order to reinforce and consolidate your concepts.
A few of questions (at most 10) in PMI-ACP are simply fact recalls. But you will want to ensure that you can get them all correct.
b. The 2020 Scrum Guide (scrum.org)
Even you may not go for PSM, you are recommended to read this.
The main reason is that most (90-100) of PMI-ACP questions are situational questions.
And you are required to understand the main accountable of PO, Scrum Master (or Agile Leader in general terms), Dev.
c. PMI-ACP Exam Outline (PMI)
Some of the content outlines are high-level answers in PMI-ACP.
You will have a deeper understanding of it after doing some of practise exams.
And also when your are tending to be more of "Being Agile".
3. Practise Exams
Honestly I purchased both of Rita and PM PrepCast.
I also attempted a few times of Scrum Open.
They have their own set of benefits.
Some ground rules:
a. Only do it when you done all of practise questions in Mike's book.
b. Do not attempt the same question twice or more. Trust me. You will definitely memorise the answers and therefore the 2nd attempt and afterwards are not that useful.
c. Review and analysis the questions after the attempts no matter you got the questions correct or not. It is because you may get the correct answers by luck, and it is strongly suggested to fully understand the reason behind "Why this answer is correct"
For Rita:
There are some direct fact recall questions.
There are some fact recall questions that are not that straight forward and require thinking and understanding.
There are not that many situational questions. (Expecting around 30-40 questions per test).
The questions are not that lengthly, which may deviate with real PMI-ACP exam.
My results:
1st Time: 67% Correct
2nd Time: 81% Correct
For PM PrepCast
You should do this after you cleared the concepts through Rita (>= 80% within 2 attempts)
It is mainly because in PM PrepCast, the situational questions accounts for around half of the question banks.
And you are not suggested to waste your 1st attempts.
The questions become lengthly, and sometimes may be more lengthy than actual PMI-ACP exam.
Despite the intensity of situational questions are still can't be compared with the actual exam,
the design of situational questions are quite close to actual exam, and close to what we are potentially facing in the project team.
You should do the Papers sequentially, since the difficulty are increasing (my personal feeling).
My results:
Paper 1: 77.5% (4AT 3T)
Paper 2: 79.17% (5AT 1T 1BT)
Paper 3: 72.5% (4AT 1T 2BT)
Paper 4: 80.8% (6AT 1T)
And throughout the all Practise Exams, I still can't get all ATs in this phase.
But the deep analysis and explanation of all questions available do help a lot.
I also prepared my own note cards for the core concepts and some tricky part for my further consolidation.
This potentially paves my way to be confident enough and eventually get all ATs in real exam by combination of confidence and luck.
4. Real Exam (and a few days before it)
At the end, I only go through Mike's book for the few selected parts when the weaknesses are revealed in practise exams.
And for myself, I didn't do further preparations in 1-2 days before the real exam.
You should have consolidated all the things and mind map well before it in order to have full understanding.
You will easily get nervous if you rush in deadline, trust me.
For memorization, actually you don't need if you really understands the things.
You will eventually get familiarised about the specific tools, games and methods.
And for the real exam, most of them are situational questions about the best course actions and accountable.
You should think based on Agile Manifesto (4 Core Values and 12 Principles), the accountable for different roles, and PMI-ACP syllabus outline.
Effectively, you should think how to "Being Agile" instead of "Doing Agile".
There are limited amount of questions which is simply fact recall / definition recall.
There are even 1-2 unknown terms that didn't appear in Mike's book nor all sort of practise exams.
I finished all questions within 2 hrs, and marked around 40 questions for review.
Then I used extra 0.5 hr to review all marked questions in order to think deeply about the best course actions and accountable.
When I see Congratulations, I feel relaxed. And then after I received the report, I am shocked by the fact that I got all ATs.
Hopefully the experience can help.
Good luck everyone!
