Exam Feedback to Fellow PMP'ers

Fellow Project Management Professionals – first and foremost I’d like to apologize for taking so long to provide feedback following my PMP exam on 1 May 2015. Just as Tim had preached throughout the Vet2PM course, anyone can successfully passed on the first try and amazingly; I did. What I’d like to share while it is still fresh are the things that I did leading up to the exam that I feel helped me get over the hump, as well as the basic approaches that were recommended and that I followed the day of, and during the exam. The reference material that I focused my studies on; I almost exclusively focused my review on the text book (Andy Crowe’s How to Pass on Your First Try Fifth Edition), the Velociteach’s laminated trifold, and the student workbook provided. I also found electronic copies of the PMBOK, and two other references (Reed Integration, Inc., PMP Exam Success Sheet and PMP Boot Camp study guide) that I borrowed from a co-worker to be very useful. I finished my Vet2PM class on 24 February, monitored Tim’s next course in March, and took Tim’s 16 day study plan, spread it out over the month of April and almost on a daily basis continued to go over material and test questions leading up to my exam. Because I’m more of an audio learner, I listened to Andy, Bill, and Lewis CDs about five times more than I should have, but for me it worked. At about 10 days prior to the exam that I took a complete 200 question exam (text book), I took another complete exam (InSite) at the seven day out mark, and my last (Exam Central) four days prior to my test. Understanding that there a many tests that PMI can serve up, my actual exam on 1 May was most similar to the test questions provided viawww.examcentral.net . Looking back, I would have spent more time on Exam Central if I was starting over. Also, focus on those lessons learned shared by Tim in the “Lessons Learned from a recent successful PMP!” (https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/6961974-5999227747203833857 ). They were on my test as well. Day of and Test – I did my brain dump of the framework and formula map and let the 15 prep minutes tick down before starting that test. I finished all 200 questions with about 15 minutes remaining and was able to review about 15 of the 30 or so that I had marked. I found the style of questions to be very straight forward (Exam Central like) – and I don’t remember any question on my test that was ‘which answer is NOT, or which answer is LEAST right’. Some questions were softballs, but many were a paragraph or two and sometimes tricky. A few times I found myself performing way more math than the question required because I jumped too quickly at my approach within my formula map. I would also estimate that I referred back to my formula map at least 20 or more times (thanks Tim for the 5 step process – it works!), and referred back to my framework at least 15 or more times which made both well worth it to produce during my 15mins of prep time. I remember drawing out at least 3 – 4 network diagrams and performing both forward and backward passes.