I passed my exam today and sharing some lessons learned and how the PrepCast simulator helped me in my preparation
PMP Exam Experience: This was in line with what other members have posted recently and key highlights are:
1. Questions were mostly 2-3 sentences long and I found very few of them to be vague or confusing.
2. I found the actual exam questions to be easier than PrepCast full length exams - highlighter/strikethrough tool really helps you break down a question and weed out incorrect answer choices and zero in on the best answer. It's a great feature that the exam provides you, please use it, however recognize that this will slow you down a bit.
3. I took the exam from home and the experience with check-in and the online Proctor was super smooth. However, I didn't realize that the first mandatory break after 60 questions doesn't automatically pop up on the screen around the 155 min mark, instead you need to time yourself and click 'end review for all' before the screen transitions to break and then the next set of 60 questions pop up. I confirmed this with the proctor and in the process lost around 10 mins. Because of this confusion, I ended up attempting my first 60 questions in 85 minutes, next 60 in 70 minutes and last 60 questions in 75 minutes. I didn't take any breaks as I was afraid the process to check in may eat into my exam time further
PrepCast Experience:
1. Helps you identify the gap areas and refine your preparation. I spent around 4.5 weeks with PrepCast exams & quizzes for a total of 960 odd questions and 20 hours. On an average, I now think 2 weeks of studying followed by 3-4 weeks of taking mock exams and closing gaps in understanding is a good approach.
2. First week I gave quizzes (both timed & learning) by knowledge area to identify gaps. I followed this up by gradually increasing the #of random questions in timed quizzes (20->30->60) so as to be able to give a 4 hour exam. I attempted 3 full length exams between weeks 2 and 3 over the weekends(78%, 82%, 86%). I spent a good 4-5 hours analyzing and studying the weak areas after each exam. I did not give the 4th exam as I found the exams getting easier and deemed 86% was good enough. I did not give the ITTO based on recent feedback that this is not tested in the exam. Week 4 I just gave KA specific quizzes on the ones I was lagging behind.
3. I found PrepCast to be the closest to the actual exam, I did look at some other question banks, mostly those available for free, but they were not as good as PrepCast. The actual exam tests your application and expects you to apply PMBOK concepts within a PMI framework. Hence, practicing questions and going through the explanations is the best way to crack this exam. I also found EduHub's and Andrew Ramdayal's videos on how to approach the questions very useful in this context,
My closing thoughts on important areas of prep - stakeholder & communications management, Agile Mindset, Understanding who a Servant Leader is and her role, boundaries in scrum for roles vs artifacts vs events (Who owns the backlog? Who attends the review and so on), understanding the role of a PM as a problem solver/ facilitator, what does a self organizing team mean?, scrum master vs dev team in removing impediments. I don't have a strong Agile background, so my list may be skewed because of that.
Here's wishing everyone the very best and a big thanks to the PrepCast team.
