Hello All,
Just thought I would share some quick lessons learned for the PMP exam as I recently passed and got my certification.
1. I read Rita Mulcahy's PMP exam prep book (9th edition). It's a great prep book. I read through it in it's entirety once, and later went through some of the chapters that I was deficient in again after taking some practice quizzes. Overall the book is very good for understanding the material but it does not provide the level of test preparation that a tool like PM PrepCast does with the exam simulations. I'll get to that next.
2. I felt that I was not prepared enough to take the actual exam, so I purchased PM PrepCast and I am glad that I did. The questions do a good job of simulating actual exam conditions and questions and in my opinion, the PM PrepCast questions are in many cases harder than what I experienced on the actual exam.
3. I only took quizzes (mixture of timed and learning). I never did a full simulation exam as I just wasn't able to ever carve out a 4.5 hour block of time to do one. I had a hard enough time just getting the time scheduled for the exam.
4. In total through PM PrepCast I took around 500 of the questions, and out of Rita's book I did another 200 questions or so. In total I took around 700 practice questions in preparation for the exam. I ended up doing pretty well on the exam and scored AT overall, hitting just T on a couple of sections.
LESSONS LEARNED
By far the biggest lesson learned from this exam and the one thing I would stress to anyone who is going to take it is to PRACTICE MANAGING YOUR TIME DURING THE EXAM. I didn't see this point get talked about a lot on here, but the exam is a grueling 200 questions, and you really don't have a lot of time to answer each question (1.2 minutes per question). And because of how wordy and confusing some of the questions can be, I found myself re-reading the question or the answers a couple of times before selecting what I thought was the best answer choice. Make sure when using PM PrepCast that you practice as much as you can doing timed quizzes/exams, and get used to that pace. You will not have a whole lot of time to think about questions, and you will need to get used to "speed reading" through questions and selecting the best responses as quickly as possible to manage your time. I did practice some doing the timed quizzes in PMPrepCast and I sort of just figured during the exam I would adjust appropriately and would have enough time (it'll all even out, right?). After all, nobody else was talking about time management so it must not be that big of a deal right? Wrong. I wasn't watching the clock closely enough and even during my midway break, I was down to having around 1 minute/question to answer. Once I had answered around 150 of the questions I realized I was like 10 minutes behind schedule (so if I answered 1 question per minute, I would not have been able to answer the last 10 questions). So for the last 50 questions I basically read through them as quickly as possible, and answered them as quickly as possible. I barely got to the end and I ended up having to guess entirely on the last question as I only had 4 seconds left to answer it once I had gotten to it.
Overall time management is what I would stress the most. I actually overprepared for the exam in terms of my project management knowledge, but because I didn't properly manage my time during the exam, I probably ended up missing a handful of questions that I otherwise would have gotten right. I think I busted out the online Pearson calculator only once, and the whiteboard thing is not user friendly at all. And again, because of time constraints it's not like your going to have time to use it anyways. Good luck drawing a network diagram and calculating the critical path in MS Paint in 1.2 minutes. It isn't gonna happen. Just use your brain/best judgement and answer the questions as quickly as possible. Pretty much all of the questions were situational "you are the project manager for X and V, Y, and Z happen. What do you do?" There were not any calculations on the exam really. The questions mostly just gave you the values already and had you draw a conclusion from those values "You are managing a construction project and the CPI is 1.2 and the SPI is 0.8. What should you be most focused on?" Stuff like that.
If I could give any advice to the people that make the PMP exam it would be to make the questions more challenging but give people adequate time to answer them. I didn't feel like this exam really tested my project management knowledge as much as it tested how well I could take a timed multiple choice test and "watch the clock/keep a pace". The questions were actually fairly easy in comparison to what you are expected to know as a project manager. There weren't really any calculations and you didn't have time to do any calculations anyways (other than maybe real quick variance or ratio calculations). Mostly just situational type questions.
I hope this write up helps anyone out there whos currently preparing for the PMP exam!
