Hello everyone
Glad to report that I passed the PMP in first attempt after 2.5 months of preparation.. and feeling much better now.
Scored Proficient in ALL areas, & Moderately Proficient in Closing .
This and other forums already have good info on what materials to use and how to study etc..so I will not re-hash it all.
I have the following suggestions for the Prepcast makers and folks currently studying for PMP :
Prepcast
The Prepcast is good.. however it more useful if you have an iPod, and can listen to it on the go. For folks like me who just have a regular MP3, could not use it as much I would have liked. I wish they offered the MP3 versions of everything. I could barely 'watch' 30% of it all on my laptop.. and once I got the 35 contact hrs cert (after the mandatory 2 weeks).. I was unable to find time to return to it.
The PMP Exam Simulator
It is good, except that it did hang on me after a 4 hr exam and its 'resume after crash' did not work for me. In terms of the content it covers -it was good. However I suggest that other free sample exams online should also be attempted.
Actual PMP exam was as below:
- Took me ALL of 4 hrs (without a single break & had absolutely no time to review any marked questions at all). Contrary to my expectation.. quite a few qns were wordy, and it was not like it had insignificant info.. so I still had to read thru it all. I started cautiously..realizing that the questions were bit tricky.. so I had to read them carefully, ensuring I read all options. In many cases, none of the choices were obviously wrong, so I found I had to really be careful. knew right from the end of the first hr that I was running behind by about 10 mins.. and would not have time for any breaks. Fortunately I wasnt planning on taking any break anyway.. though I had to control my urge for a bio break. The exam center restrooms were a few hundred feet away.. and even a quick break would have cost me atleast 5 valuable mins. I am quite amazed how other folks are able to finish the exam in just 2.5 to 3 hrs. I was even maintaining a manual tally of high priority questions I would like to re-vist.. but 2 hrs into the exam, I realized I will never have time to use it.. so I stopped marking questions for review
- Be careful when creating your dumpsheet before the exam. I started off creating one even before starting the tutorial.. and didnt look up at the screen at all.. when I finally glanced up.. I realized there was a timer which had a big Red warning that the exam would end if I didnt start the tutorial within the next 30 secs.. obviously I pounced on the button to prevent disaster ! In the tutorial the calc functions still didnt explain how to do the x^y function (which may be needed in PV calc), and the calc on the exam didnt have the x^y function. Luckily I didnt get any question requiring it.
- The review function on the actual exam wasnt so user friendly(it was legend based and the listing was very crammed), so I was afraid to leave the network diag questions (which I got 3 of) for the end..for fear that I would not be able to return to it..so my original plan of keeping them for the end had to be improvised. Also I knew I was running late, and would probably not have time for review..so I figured it was best to tackle them while I was on the question..rather than hunting for them later in a pressure situation.
- Another noteworthy aspect was that I don't recall seeing any Code of conduct/prof resp questions at all.. yes..not even one. And I am glad about it.. coz they can be really tricky.
- Almost all questions were situation based - so the trick is to map it to the appropriate process and answer accordingly. Also I saw quite a few ITTO based questions (more than just 8 to 10 as per Rita's book). Saw almost no defination based questions.. and was again glad - coz I never really got thru reading the PMBOK glossary
Hope above helps to those preparing ! All the best
