TOPIC: I PASSED in first attempt !! AT overall ... Here is my Lessons Learned Register

YESSS !! I PASSED THE PMP EXAM ... What an amazing feeling ! Sorry for a long post but ,I have been reading through all the posts in this forum for all the lessons learned & now its my turn to pay it forward..
So here is my final PMP project report and my lessons learned register to be included in Prepcast's Lessons learned Repository before I close my project

First of all Thank you Cornelius and all the PM Prepcast team for building this awesome website and exam simulation experience. The tremendous efforts Prepcast team has put in putting it all together is amazing.
What I liked most and I think is unique to Prepcast simulation is it tells you why you answered something wrong in addition to explanation of right answer. I can definitely say that I passed due to the Prepcast Exam Simulator. The real exam questions were very similar and situational. I had no straightforward question in the entire exam. Each question made me think 2-3 times before answering or even striking out a clearly wrong answer.

1. Application & Audit
I was procrastinating the PMP exam for a long time .. for last 5 years ! First because I never finished my application which I started in 2013 ( yes with PMBOK 4 ) and then I never had enough willpower to put in the efforts required to prepare for it .
In April of this year I attended an in-house training program at my office which gave me the 35 contact hours needed to apply for PMP. Since I attended that, I decided to finish my application and finally stop pushing it even further. So I submitted my application in June I got an email saying my application is selected for audit ( yes it really was random because this email was received within few seconds of submitting my application and even before I got a receipt of the application submission)
Honestly I felt like it was a set back with my already delayed journey but I was decided that I'll do it this time .. Thankfully I only included one of my previous employer experience in my overall 4500 experience hours. So getting that experience signed from a peer was a little cumbersome .. Other than that all the other projects were from my current organization for which I could get the signatures ( I did informed all of them in advance before submitting my application that I'm putting them as a reference ) . I finally mailed all the experience verification documents to PMI and my application was approved . I got an email pretty quickly that I'm eligible to schedule my exam.

2.Study / Practice
I studied about 200 hrs total since I scheduled the exam 2.5 months back. But again we had a family vacation, work pressures so I didn't study much until end of July. In first week of August I got a reminder about rescheduling without the penalty and I realized that I was not anywhere close to being ready for the exam. So I looked for rescheduling & all the dates were blocked until November. I really wanted this to be over so I decided to stick to it .. That's when I truly started studying. I started reading PMBOK & Rita M but quickly realized that reading textbook is not my cup of tea.. so I started looking for videos and that's when I came across Prepcast. I saw the exam simulator with 8 exams and thought that to be a great investment. First 2 exams results were not at all promising (63.5 % & 65.5 %) which made me really worried about my knowledge so I purchased prepcast premium and started listening to videos for my knowledge gap areas and then reading corresponding pages in PMBOK & Rita. That's what really helped ! I re-did First exam and this time scored 82 % which gave me a little confidence but still this was second attempt so I was skeptical. I was also doing other free exams like simplilearn, edward -designer suggested exams etc. and my scores were consistently below 70 % until 1.5 weeks before the exam. I was truly worried . Then exactly 1 week before exam I took the 3rd test and scored 76 % this time. I thought I have some hopes. Following 4 days I was taking 1 exam a day in the morning and was reviewing my results in the afternoon. I took my last 7th exam 2 days before exam day and still didn't hit 80% mark. I was 75 %. But reading all the lessons learned here made me hopeful of passing. Here are my scores for prepcast exams 1 to 7
1. 63.5 %
2. 65.5 %
3 . 76 %
4. 68 %
5. 72.5%
6. 72%
7. 75%

3. Exam day
My exam was at 8am but the prometric center was 25 miles away from where I live so I left home at 6:15 am to beat the traffic. I reached around 7 am and the center opened around 7:15 . They allowed me to enter exam area earlier than scheduled which helped because I was extremely nervous.At that time, I had a feeling that I have forgotten everything I learned .. but when it started, time just flew. I took one 5 min restroom break at around 105th question and was able to finish my first pass in 3hr 15min. The strikeout and highlight feature of the real exam is really helpful & helped me understand the questions better. The questions were very similar to what I practiced through prepcast .. I felt they were trickier than mock exam but were not lengthy ( 4-5 lines max) The 45 min to review my marked questions was helpful too. I finished at 3:57 but believe me that survey before the result appears was so nerve-racking &&&& I saw the Congratulations message ... OMG ! What an great feeling of accomplishment ... I did AT overall, 2 Ts ,2 ATs and 1 Needs Improvement in Closing which was very surprising because I never got NI in any of the 15 something full mock exams I did. But hey ... I PASSED.. that's what matters .. Even with 1 NI, I was overall AT which was satisfying !

I hope my experience will help someone achieve their PMP dream ...

Pooja

Hi Pooja,

Congratulations on passing the PMP Exam! Thank you for sharing your insights here. We are glad our products contributed to such an amazing feat in your career.

Thank you very much!