TOPIC: Passed Exam at 1st attempt on 27 Mar. 2017

I’m project engineer of EPC plant engineering in Japan, non-native in English. I passed PMP exam without supplemental language on 26 Mar. 2017 at 1st attempt. The followings are what I prepared for exam and my impression to actual exam.

Location: Japan
Date: 26 Mar. 2017

Material for Preparation
- PM precast
- PMBOK 5th Edition
- Wikipedia (nice material!)

Schedule for Preparation
- Started reading PMBOK guide from chapter 1 on Oct 2016. In parallel, I looked for a way to get Contact hour. I found PM precast and purchased end of December.
- At first, I made planning to listen PM precast from 1.00 to 13.99. Calculated time of each pod cast and assigned of 2 hours amount on each day from 5 January. (you can use attached file for your planning)
- Compared actual progress against plan and changed plan two times because I couldn't catch points of lessons at one time, so I repeated it. It takes approx. 3 hours to listen 2 hours lessons. Also, I needed to support my family because my wife has a baby on middle of February. It stops my progress for 3 weeks.
- I finished all lessons on 14 March and started exam simulator. I took two exam simulators, 75% and 79% correctness respectively. I marked questions that I concerned and after taking exam I carefully read explanation of them and also failed questions. It could network knowledge on each process and clarified differences between confusing words. It activated knowledge that I listened 2 months before. This review took about 8 hours for each exam.
- On exam day, I arrived at Prometrik center one hour before starting exam. I used full-time to answer the all questions even though I could finish exam similator with 30 minutes remaining.

Impression for Exam
- The actual exam is more difficult than exam simulator. Almost questions are situation based questions, such as “What should Project manager have done to avoid this situation?”, “What should Project manager do next step?”. Examiner have to read 3 or 4 sentences to grasp the situation.
- Exam simulator’s questions have many ITTO based questions with short sentence question, or some questions can be easily answered by reading only the last sentence. This technique is also introduced in PM precast and it can help to answer exam simulator’s questions but it's not practical to actual exam.

Conclusion
- PM precast is very helpful not to only pass exam, but also to learn what project manager is expected to act. Important ideas are repeatedly introduced in separate lessons, which is good practice to keep it in mind. To carefully listen all podcasts is enough to prepare for examination.
- Exam simulator should have more situational based questions.

Thanks Cornelius Fichtner!!