TOPIC: Language assisstant during the exam

Hi!
I passed my PMP exam a couple of weeks ago. You can find an entry for the lessons learned from that in this forum. Above that, I wanted to share some lessons learned from using the language assisstant during the PMP exam as I found that there are only a few lessons learned about that on the net. Here you go:

I am a German native speaker and therefore chose the German language assistant although I am more used to English in my job as I have worked abroad (and still doing it) since more than 6 years now and especially learned everything regarding PMP in English.

During my studies for the PMP exam I had sometimes difficulties to understand certain words, terms or phrases in English and realized during some prep tests that in some occasions it was almost impossible to answer a question or choose the correct answer. After some research on the net I made the decision to use the language assistant during the real PMP exam. For those who do not know, you need to apply for it when you apply for the exam on the PMI webside.

I read through some available test questions in German before the exam and realized that reading all questions in German during the exam will not work as I learned everything in English and the chosen German is quite different compared to the English. So, I came up with the strategy to focus on the English questions and answers in the exam and only look to the German text when I have an issue with understanding a word or a phrase.

During the exam the question and answer in German were in the upper half of the screen, the English in the lower half. You can only tick the English answers not the ones from the other language.

Here the summary of my exam experience with the language assistant:

• It was good not to read both languages in parallel for every question as that would have been timewise impossible for all questions
• I checked the German text only for some specific words I did not 100% understood in English and for 3 long questions with a lot of information where you had to distinguish what information is relevant and what not for the answer. All in all I made approx. 10 times use of the language assistant and in these cases it really helped me!!!
• What was somehow annoying and actually „costed“ time was that in the majority of the questions not both questions and answers fitted to the screen. That meant, the question and two answers from the Enlish text for example were displayed, then I had to scroll down to read the other 2 answers, then back to maybe re-read the question then back to read all answers. If I wanted to read the German text too, I had also to scroll in the upper half of the screen! I think that took away a few seconds per question. That take some second for every questions and if you multiply it with 200 questions it ends up to a few minutes.
• A solution could have been to change the screen resolution, but that idea came to me after the exam It might also be that in some test centers the screens are that large that it is no problem at all. It might also be an advice to check with the test center in advance.

Hope, that will help some other non-English-native speakers

Good luck with the exam!

Best regards, Jens