fbpx

Reply: We're increasing the PMP Exam Time in Simulator from 230 to 250 mins

Name
E-mail
Your e-mail address will never be displayed on the site.
Subject
Message

Topic History of : We're increasing the PMP Exam Time in Simulator from 230 to 250 mins

Max. showing the last 6 posts - (Last post first)
6 months 3 days ago #30845

Dominic Hickey

Dominic Hickey's Avatar

Hi Habib,
Is your question about the real PMP exam or the PrepCast Simulator? (They differ slightly on these points.)

If it's about the real PMP exam, you can only review the questions of the sixty-question section that you have just done, i.e. at the end of questions 1-60, at the end of 61-120, and at the end of 121-180. Note that you cannot go back and re-review a previous section's questions once you have confirmed that you are ready to move to the next section and/or confirmed that you have completed the exam having reviewed the last section.

Yes, an alert pops up at the appropriate time to remind you.

As for not wanting to take a break, I'm curious: why would you choose or want this?
You gain no extra time to answer questions by not taking the break and the sole advantage in cutting the breaks is to finish the exam earlier than the other candidates.
It is quite a demanding exam experience, in particular due to the time pressure. I haven't met anyone who hasn't appreciated having (just) ten minutes between the sections in which to take a moment away from the screen.
6 months 3 days ago #30844

Habib Gailan

Habib Gailan's Avatar

if I don't want to take a break and keep continue with exam, my question is when can I review unanswered /forgotten/ flagged questions? at the end of the exam?

is there any alert message pop up?

The bottom line here is I know there will be lengthy question which I need more time to answer them at the end of the exam!

thanks,
6 months 1 week ago #30812

Beto L

Beto L's Avatar

Thanks so much, Dominic.

I have missed somehow your last reply! :)

Thanks again
7 months 3 weeks ago #30706

Dominic Hickey

Dominic Hickey's Avatar

No worries, Fabio; I'm glad to help if I can. It sounds like you've got things well under control and a clear idea of the challenge ahead. That's half the battle.

I'll try to expand on the points you've raised and fill in some other blanks that I think may be useful. (I hope we're not going too far off-topic in this thread, moderators. :))

After having tried my first batch of 10 timed PrepCast practice questions back in mid-November 2022, I decided that the added time pressure was stopping me from getting the most from the explanations. I only did non-timed ones from then on.

I generally did groups of 10 or 20 questions in one go, simply due to other life constraints. Yes, I also found that reading -- and most importantly properly *understanding* -- all of the explanations took a long time, but it's really, really worth it in my opinion. It gets quicker as one becomes more familiar with the vocabulary and contexts.
Some days I would do as many as 50 practice questions in total, but never all in one session.

The in-person course that I took was with a local company specializing in training for professional certifications. It was designed to provide about 42 hours of classroom time, so a little more than the 35 hours of formal contact that PMI requires candidates to have had before they can apply to take the exam.
The group was limited to 12 candidates and we had class once a week. I live in a French-speaking region, so all of the training was in French. Having to learn terms and vocabulary in two languages takes longer but it also helped to reinforce my understanding and memorization.

Our classroom time was divided between PowerPoint presentations of salient points, distilled from years of the company's teaching for the PMP exam, and then equally-useful sessions where we could bring problems/grey areas to the group and clarify them together with the tutor. He did lots of coaching on how to approach the question styles of PMI. We also spent a good chunk of time towards the second half of the course on how to draft and submit applications in order to have our professional experience validated by PMI. (It takes longer than we all expected to write and rewrite these texts.)

On the first day, the whole group was tentatively registered at an exam centre for a date that was about one month after the end of the course. The week before the end of the course, we had all had to submit our applications to PMI and hopefully be accepted, so that we could take the exam together on the target date.

From the very first class, the tutor underlined the point that working through questions in PrepCast between classes would be of the utmost importance and that we couldn't leave it all until the last weeks/days before the exam. He asked us to aim for 200 questions per week (!), on top of reading large sections of the PMBOK7 and the Agile Practice Guide.
About five weeks before the PMP exam date, he then asked everyone to have done the first PrepCast Simulator exam, in exam conditions at home, even if we didn't feel ready, and to talk through our experiences in the next class. Most people in the class didn't pass the first one, but he reassured the group that that was usually the case. The company had an excellent success rate for the PMP, so this approach seems to work. After that, he suggested that we continue taking the remaining Simulator exams regularly, around once a week, which I did.

If I recall correctly, I finished doing all of the available practice questions (except the ITTO ones) in the same week that I took the third practice exam, so I was still doing practice questions alongside the Simulator exams. They aren't really any different, you just have the added complication of the 250-minute countdown timer for the exams and the need for greater physical and mental endurance!
Reading through all of the answers/explanations after each practice exam took up my available study time for three or four days following each one. That was even more tiring than taking the exams, but very useful.

By that point, I had built up copious notes (using OneNote) and made hundreds of digital flashcards (using the free version of Quizlet), allowing me to study anywhere that I had access to an internet-connected device. I found studying/learning the complete glossaries of the two PMI texts that I mentioned earlier was an excellent return on investment of my time, helping me to understand the PrepCast answer explanations faster. YouTube is also a great source of content for PMP preparation.

When I wasn't using the above, the rest of my studying was looking things up online in order to better understand why I had got certain questions wrong, trying to find further supporting explanations and to expand on the often limited information in the PMBOK or the Agile Practice Guide. Too often, in those texts there will only be a line or a paragraph about an obscure subject which is mentioned in a practice or exam question's explanation. I lost count of the times that I went down internet rabbit holes looking these up, but the active learning is of great value!

Anyway, I've rambled on enough. Keep up the hard work. There will be days when you don't have the time or energy, but try as much as you can to add to your practice and knowledge each day, even if it's just a single batch of 10 questions. It's all worth it.
7 months 3 weeks ago #30705

Beto L

Beto L's Avatar

Thanks so much again, Dominic. Much appreciate!

Extremelly helpful insights again! :)

Your insights really helped me, as I am looking for a strategy to get the most out of this simulator.

I started yesterday and I much appreciated the explanations added to ALL the answers per each question (correct/incorrect ones). I am reading all of them very carefully (word by word).

I started with a batch of 60 questions, all timed, as I want to disciplined myself to respond in 1 min / 70 secs max. (I will do the test in English but this is not my first language).

While I enjoyed the first attempt, I felt that took loads of my time to read all the explanations of the answers carefully and I added some of that content in a separate file for my future reads. This took me loads of time to do yesterday.

That's why came to my mind to write to you again. I fully agree with you, I will reduce my batches, perhaps 20-30 max 40 per time. As I really want to spend time in the explanations and not to get too tired. Once I have done a lot of it, then, I will take one of the 4 hours exam practice without interruptions.

I got very curious now. In this training that you did. How was the dynamic/structure of the training? I mean, what you learned, which tools/material you used during the training but in-between the PrepCast when you went to pratice the 10-20 batches and then finally practice the Exam simulators of 4 hours? :)

Thanks again, much helpful!!!
Fabio
7 months 3 weeks ago #30704

Dominic Hickey

Dominic Hickey's Avatar

Hi Fabio,
When preparing for my PMP certification, I took an in-person class led by a very experienced tutor who had guided numerous groups to success through using the PrepCast Questions and Exam Simulator as a principal tool. Part of our course fees included our individual PrepCast subscriptions. We were among the first of the groups that he led that used PMBOK7 (instead of PMBOK6) as the 'core' reference text. Our tutor told us during our first class together that the ITTO questions and Exam simulation would not be a great use of our limited time, and I don't think that anyone did them. We all passed the real exam first time.

As far as using the simulator, it's important to recognize that we all learn differently, so what worked for me won't necessarily work for others.
For me, I found that doing a few batches of 10-20 PrepCast questions every day in the two months leading up to the exam was the most helpful, eventually answering them all, and then doing one of the four practice exams each weekend in the final month. I did the practice questions untimed, in order to be able to read through all the answers/explanations. This was where I felt I consolidated my knowledge the most.
Then, having the practice of answering the exam simulator questions under time pressure helped the most with preparing for the exam process.

While I do think that any extra learning and knowledge can only be a good thing, if you don't have time to do the ITTO parts, don't be overly concerned. I have written elsewhere in these Forums about the balance and nature of the questions that I encountered in my exam, and I recall feeling that not having memorized the official process ITTOs didn't put me at a disadvantage. (I did have a general understanding of them from having read some other sources concerning the PMP process groups, so I think it's still a good idea to learn as much as possible.)

The bottom line (in my opinion)? Consistent learning across several weeks (at least) to establish solid knowledge and understanding, followed by focussed exam-taking preparation.

OSP INTERNATIONAL LLC
OSP INTERNATIONAL LLC
Training for Project Management Professional (PMP)®, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)®, and Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)®

Login