Report from a PMP exam-writer

Hello to all our PMP and CAPM exam-writers, especially those newly added to the distribution list. I try to send a message each month. Here is a message from one of our recent exam-writers, who took our short 3-day PMP Preparation taught by Janice Petley. In that particular course, we hand out Rita Mulcahy’s famous PMP Preparation book.

Hi All, I wrote my exam last Monday and passed! It was tough, as it is difficult to gauge progress as you are going through the questions. I had no issues with time, and even submitted the test early to stop from second-guessing myself and my answers.

Many of the questions were very situational, and often I just used what I would do at work as the answer. Aside from that, the material covered in class helped immensely. I wish I could have read more of Rita’s book; A LOT of her material is covered on the test.

There were terms that you “may” want to look into, such as Expected Present Value (sic) and what NPV exactly is and differences between these 2 terms. There were some questions that were totally different, but maybe they were the “testing” questions. EV calculations were straightforward. May be worthwhile practising Point of Total Assumption questions with calculations.

The area that I struggled most with was project selection; this came up more than once and used more IRR calculations, opportunity cost values and other financial terms. Some I knew from other courses/experiences and others were hard.

All in all it is not tough to pass, but tough to know every question, unless you really study from a variety of sources. There were quite a few questions on conflict resolution, but the terminology was more broad than what is covered in the course or in PMBOK, so may be worth knowing different phrases on that topic.

Thanks Janice for the great class, keep in touch, K.