Alhamdulillah I have passed my PMI ACP exam in my first try at 18-12-2017 with six "Above Target" and one "Target". I am narrating my lessons learned throughout my journey and I would be glad if anyone find it useful.
After my PMP my brother recommended me (around one and a half year ago) to do this certification as being part of the software development industry he thinks it would be more relevant. As I have already done my PMP and my confidence was sky high and I was thinking it would be like a walk in the park for me but fortunately I did some googling and came across some "lessons learned" by the fellow PMPs who appeared in the ACP exam as well. In those "lessons learned" they unanimously cautioned not to take it lightly and I am glad I took their advice seriously.
So I started doing the research of my own about how I should start preparing for it and found out one reference book which is a must i-e PMI ACP Exam Prep By Mike Griffith. I got the copy of it and started reading and making notes. After reading the book and practicing questions in it, I signed up here for the formal training. The training was great but the thing which helped me more than the videos lectures is the simulator. The quality of the questions in the simulator is exceptional and very close to what I encountered in the actual exam. So I urge everyone who plan to signup here for the training, to purchase the simulator subscription as well. You would not find anything near to it in terms of quality in the free questions repositories (though practicing free available apart from trying out the simulator is also a good idea). Out of 4 exam I tried on simulator I passed three of them and failed in one. After the practice exam please review the questions you could not provide the correct answers for and try to understand the reasons why you got the answer wrong. If you does not agree with the reasoning provided convey your feedback to them, their support is amazing they normally get back to you within the next 24 hours with more insights and that would sometimes show you a different approach about how you can approach a question.
And then came the D day. Well the questions I had in the exam are mostly situational I hardly got a single straightforward question. And I found those more difficult than I did have in my PMP exam. But the good thing is the questions were not lengthy. One question does not take more than a single minute to answer. But you have to be focused to get them right because sometimes it is only a single word in the question which determines which is the best answer out of the possible two or sometimes three. It took a little over 2 hours for me to answer all of the questions. Though you can terminate the exam before time but it is good if you utilize the remaining time in reviewing the questions. While reviewing You should thoroughly go through ALL of the first 20 questions because at the start you mostly get panicked and could not notice the little but decisive details in the question. I almost corrected 4 answers from the first 20 while reviewing & overall corrected some 5-6 from the rest of the questions.
