TOPIC: Passed PMP on First Try (4P + 1MP)

Hi, I began my PMP journey on Jan 01, 2015 and it brought me success on Jul 04, 2015

I researched and narrowed down on PMP Prep-cast as a choice for both Contact Hours and the Exam Simulator
I also bought RMC to start my preparations

As a practicing PM, i did relate to a lot that was in the texts however as we all know, practically we use a lot of tailoring of the processes and therefore it was important to go against the usual practice and instead use the best practice from PMI

I was very on and off and in April (original target date) almost gave up, however i continued to give tests and work my way through, thankfully it all picked up steam in May and June

Prep-Cast is very good and i think it serves as a once over for PMP Handbook, after prepcast and RMC, i used PMP Handbook as a reference to understand a few things but did not really read it through

I think learning ITTOs is useful as it increases hits by quite a few percentage points

As there are 400 questions, there would rarely be anything that is missed on the exam

During the end game of my preparations i gave quite a lot of attention to Executing Processes as it has the highest percentage in questions

I used Abhishek Nairs xls for quick revision and to review important points, it is based on PMP 4 and therefore i revised it where ever necessary

I found the free questions very inaccurate and therefore decided to stick to only paid question banks
1. Used the online resource in PMI for members - PMP Exam Prep: Questions, Answers & Explanations, 2013 Edition by Christopher Scordo SSI Logic © 2013
2. PMP Prepcast was very essential to practice however i was able to finish the tests generally within 3 hours. A short coming for the test resource is that the graphical questions have same data and therefore after 1st test, i had it always in my mind but otherwise the questions are good quality and the explanation is exceptional. I also used the online feedbacks to get more info and was overall satisfied with the response. So all in all it is the best preparation resource
4. At one point i realized that the question banks were becoming 1 dimensional so i bought Achieve PMP Success and the quality of questions is very good, i relied heavily on it for my last days preparations. Strongly recommend on completing the question banks and tests for a very PMP like feel
5. Head First PMP online exam is not very good and i think i did not learn anything with it

The question banks despite the best efforts from authors do have ambiguous questions and i found it a bit frustrating to understand the intent of such questions. It worried me because such ambiguous questions would be a challenge in exam
No Oliver Lehmann/ other popular resources were used. I was worried not following the standard path but still i tried to back my self up

In the tests/quizzes i scored always above 75% and in later days was scoring above 85% regularly

Day of the Exam -
The questions were of very good quality, all of them situation based. No long descriptions and it was important to read the full questions as the irrelevant part was mixed with the relevant and importantly apart from 2 questions i found no questions were ambiguous in any way

A lot of topics were repeated but answers kept changing based on the situation and therefore it was bit taxing.

Was able to finish the test 30 mins before and used the last 30 mins to review marked questions, in between got really anxious as i felt that i was changing too many answers and skipped a few questions without checking. I believe and from my experiences in mocks, reviewing answers had helped me pick the right choices. We have to be very careful with this approach because most people say that the first picks are generally good but in my review i carefully evaluated the answers that i chose to change and mostly they were right. i think in my case i have the tendency to choose the wrong answer when deciding between two choices.

I was very anxious in the end and thought that i had flunked given the no of choices i changed/ did not change and the test ended as i ran out of time. I was relieved to see that apart from initiating (MP) i had scored Proficient in all other process groups.

After 10 mins absorbing the fact that i passed i felt sad as i missed 5P by a whisker but then i had started the day with the hope to just pass and therefore was able to cheer myself up