Hi All
I passed my exam on friday on the first attempt.. which was awesome since I found the exam rather difficult..particularly the first half. I believe that doing lots of practice questions and the practise 4 hour exams helped me a lot - although i found many questions worded quite differently to what is in the exam simulator, at least i was able to go through the process of elimination as i had practiced, firstly understanding what the question was asking and then understanding what process or process group it was refering to. There were a lot of questions that said what should the PM do next or what is the best thing for the PM .. these questions give different answers so make sure tyou read the questions carefully and understand when you should do a change requests versus updating the issue log or risk register.
Apart from the exam simulator questions, i also used PM training exam questions which are about 30 exams of 50 questions which were great if i didnt have time to sit for 4 hours and spend another 4 hours going through the answers.
Prior to doing the questions i spent about 2 months reading through the PMBOK and Andy Crowes book and made my own notes that i could then refer back to. Once I had revised these i then started doing practice questions and referred back to my notes or the books when i wasnt sure of an answer or didnt quite understand why it was the correct one.
I felt that i learned a lot more by doing questions than my reading the material.
Once i had done 3 or 4 full exams and was consistently getting 80+ % , I then booked my exam for the following week. I had completed almost all of the PM training short exams before doing the 4 our exams.
It is important to know the ITTOS but there were not alot of questions specificially asking what ITTO was used or should be used. I found most of the questions to be situational - what should the PM do..
I did my exam online and i started it 20 mins late due to issues launching the program. The exam also stopped at one point and i had to wait 7-8 mins untl it got started again. It felt as though i was at my desk for 5 hours in total from when i logged on to when I logged off.. and that is why it is important to practice with the 4 hour exams as sitting for that long takes practice. Also i was told to take off my watch half way through and to stop reading the questions out aloud.. however that only happened when they changed proctors .. so it depends on who you get.
I hope this info helps and you guys are successful in passing your exam as well .. i
