I spent a while debating about the online exam so I thought I'd share my experience with you. I wrote it earlier today after having my original exam cancelled twice due to COVID-19.
-I was trying to be in good time and logged in about 40 minutes early. But the link does not become available until 30 minutes early
-I also did the system check when prompted via email about 2 days before my test - but this is a waste of time - they make you do it all over again on exam day. Moderate privacy concerns.... who knows where that copy of my Driver's license is now!
-they were having technical issues with my login. Brace yourself. I had to submit photos 4 or 5 times in a row before it finally worked
-you chat with someone who does the check-in procedure - but I never made any contact with the proctor. They're just there I assume. There is a small box showing your own webcam right at the top of the screen the whole time.
-It's pretty straightforward otherwise. The highlight and strikethrough features are theoretically useful but i found they took too much time to be practical. Use sparingly. I ended up needing the entire 4 hours just to get through the exam
-I didn't actually get any demo or lesson on the whiteboard. It's easy enough to figure out but it's pretty useless compared to paper/pen. And a huge pain in the ass to try to do a complicated network diagram with. I probably spent a solid 8 minutes on that question and still screwed it up. I know I could have done it easily in 2 minutes on paper. In the grand scheme things that's only one question and I didn't get many questions that really required paper
As for the exam itself, I really did not enjoy it. Yes, I passed (above target!) on my first attempt. But I expected it to be a better experience after the amount of effort I put into it. There is a ton of knowledge gained through studying the PMBOK. And I feel like I wasn't really tested on any of it. I was almost exclusively tested on my ability to wade through obfuscation and ambiguity. Maybe it's just luck of the draw. I'd say 90% of my test questions were significantly harder than the exam simulator questions. I had to read many questions 3 or 4 or 5 times and still had no idea what they were even asking. I found exam simulator questions to be fairly easy to quickly decipher and put yourself within a process, or at least process group. Not so with my PMP exam. All that to say, It's a tough exam. Use the simulator - but recognize the simulator may not be at a PMP exam level in terms of difficulty. This will affect your pacing on the exam too. It takes a lot longer to read ambiguous questions. I had no problem writing in 4 hours in my simulator exams - but I used every second in my PMP exam and still had to give up on a few marked questions I would have liked more time to consider.
