I passed today!
Studying-
I began this process just ovwr a year ago with the PM Prepcast. Had to shift focus to other things for a while, but back in March I decided to start again. Got Rita's book (with Rita's exam simulator included), and PMBOK Guide. Read each of them at least 3-4 times over, and took about 6 legal pads of notes. The BEST thing I did was to purchase the Exam Simulator. It's closest to the exam in terms of format and wording.
I was worried about my inconsistent results from the simulator, though. For instance, on Exam #1 I scored 88% in Initiating. On Exam #2, I scored 50% in Initiating. This happened for each process except Closing- for that, I always scored in the upper 80's. Overall exam scores were 64%-73%.
Exam-
I was nervous because my practice exam scores were all pretty low. The questions were heavily weighted towards Risk (my best subject!), Change Mgmt, and What should you do next/first. 6-7 math questions pertaining to CV, SV, EAC, SPI, and CPI. Other CPI/SPI questions didn't imvolve calculations, and 2 network diagrams I has to draw. I had 8-10 questions about when to use types of charts. There were 2 questions that made no sense whatsoever.
I was disappointed that many of the questions seemed longer and much more difficult than the practice exams. I'd guess that 75% of my questions were 8-10 lines long. Several of the questions were very ambiguous, as were the potential answers to a few questions.
I used all 4 hours of rhe exam- took 3.5hrs to finish, and the remaining 30 min to review the ones I marked. I didn't take any breaks. Hit the "finish exam" button as I was mentally figiring when to schedule attempt #2- The test was hard and I KNEW I failed. Had to read the screen 3 times when it said I passed.
4 MP and, ironically, BP in closing (my best scores in all the practice exams).
