PMP Examination Tips from our student

Dear friends,

With an experience of delivering small and big projects for over 10 years, I never had a motivation to take certification exam. I am more of a person who likes learning concepts and applying them on the job. I had taken version 5 training from CMTI and then again version 6. However, I never wanted to go for certification. 

With this kind of attitude, it was so difficult to decide to take the exam and had it not been Krish sir to motivate me, I would not have taken the PMP exam even now. CMTI staff also supported when needed, so a big thank to them as well.

One peculiar thing that I must mention - when I had taken the training for version 6 3 years ago at CMTI, there was hardly anything agile in the content. However, now version 6 content has been modified to mostly agile.

About exam -

I booked afternoon slot at Mumbai Pearson Vue center as travelling in morning hours in Mumbai is a herculean task. Again, to avoid delay, I reached the center about 75 minutes before the exam time. The afternoon time also helps, if you are deprived of sleep in the night for whatever reasons, you can still complete the sleep and go fresh to the exam. As a workstation was available, I was asked if I wanted to start the exam early. I took the offer and started the exam early.

There are 2 breaks of 10 minutes at the end of 60 questions each. At this juncture, you must review the questions flagged for review and complete the answers. You cannot come back to these questions flagged for review later. So idea that you want to go on flagging the questions and then review the flagged questions at the end does not work. So time management is trickier. But, that’s not end of the road. Time is sufficient to complete 180 questions in 3 batches of 60 each.

About the preparation -

I am already SAFe certified as it was required during the transformation at my then organization (Scrum Master, Product Manager-Product Owner and Agilist), so agile questions and situations were of less consideration for me. Hence I had focused more on knowledge areas and process groups as that requires a lot of things to memorize. However, going by exam, I would say that now the exam contains significant portion of Agile, very little of EVM and no ITTO. 

Studying the Agile slides and learning Agile concepts thoroughly, attending Easy Pass sessions, followed by mock exams for people, process and business areas and then 3 or 4 mock exams where you score above 65 should be good enough. Don't take a gap between anything. If someday, easy pass is not there, visit the agile slides and revise the concepts. 

Answering questions in exam - 

Most questions are situation based. Remember following practical points which will help answer quite a few questions. 

1. Ethics are paramount. Any answer option that suggests otherwise, can be striked off first.

2. Never burn bridges, avoid friction. Strike such answer options first.

3. and always look for avenues to negotiate. Such answer options would generally be your answer.

4. Use of authority, controlling, escalating, reporting etc. should be the last thing when it comes to interpersonal interactions. Strike such answer options first.

Hoping this will help. Again, thanks everyone at CMTI.