After having a hard time studying, I passed my PMP exam today :). Here I would like to share my experience to those who are going to take the exam.

I started to prepare for the exam one week before it took place. Altogether I’ve spent about 35 hours on all preparation, including:

1. Read Head First PMP
2. Fast-glance on Informatics’ (i.e. the education institute) notes
3. Complete 50 Head First free online mock questions (~72%)
4. Complete 200 Informatics’ mock exam questions (~82%)
5. Complete PMPFinal 10 free online questions (60%)
6. Complete ~30 Oliver Lehmann questions (I can’t remember my score, but all questions there are way too difficult so never mind )
7. Recap ITTO before taking the exam

Noticed that I don’t even read the PMBOK during preparation, but it is highly recommended that you should go through once at least if you don’t have other similar materials (e.g. course notes). Read the glossary at the end of the book.

I found the real test MUCH more difficult than most of the mock exam I’ve taken. I’ve got ambiguous answers on half of the questions, which most of them I can eliminate to have 2 options left. The situational questions are the toughest, as they required candidates to have full understand on how the processes interact among themselves.

Okay, my suggestions on getting pass the exam:

(1) Good English

That’s what I really think of – good English. During the exam I’ve encountered some English vocabularies which I couldn’t get the meaning of them, and most of the sentences in questions were, in my opinion, “grammatically unfriendly” to non-native candidates. So if you find you are in trouble during studying, for example PMBOK, then you may need to read more related reference books or exercise more on mock questions to adapted to the style of questions you may see in the exam.

(2) Memorize all the 44 processes with correct sequence

This can be your life-saver in answering those questions asking about “the next/first thing you should do” or “the missed procedure”. As memorizing them is not difficult, I highly encourage to have them memorized so that you won’t lose marks here.

(3) Memorize ITTOs

I didn’t intend to do this for my exam either, though I could remember most of them, but I would say it definitely helps.  The tools and techniques are even worth taken a close eyes on. If you can correctly define all (or those of most important) the tools and techniques, you should be able to score a significantly large portion of questions.

(4) Make use of the time of introduction

Before the exam starts, candidates will have 15 mins time to read the introduction on how to use the system. They are trivial to normal computer users so you can ignore it if you can, instead take the time to write down all the formulas on the work sheet provided to you. Therefore you won’t be afraid that you will forget them when taking those math questions.