TOPIC: 6th Edition Exams

I am curious if anyone has attempted the 6th edition exam yet? Any advice on it vs. the PM Prepcast exam simulator, amount of Agile material, etc? I take the exam April 24.

I will be taking it on May 5th. I am also looking for advice. Please share your experience after your exam.

Hi Eric,
All the best as you prepare to take the exam on April 24th.

I took and passed the PMP exam based on PMBOK 6th Edition
on 6th April 2018. I began preparation in January and had
planned to take the exam before 26th March but was unable
to get a slot at the test centre.

Therefore in March 2018, I switched gears and started exam
prep based on PMBOK 6th Edition. My new study plan:
1) Scheduled to take the exam in a month's time (April 6th)
2) Read through PMBOK 6th Edition twice in conjunction with
a PMP Prep Course by Joseph Phillips (on Udemy)
3) Spend at least 2 hours daily on a knowledge area (used the
exam prep course to guide me)
4) Took all the exams at the end of each knowledge area.
5) Once I was done with a knowledge area I would take
least 100 practice questions.
- For this I recommend the PM Prepcast exam simulator (which I had a chance to use for my exam prep before March)
- My reasons: you can choose the knowledge areas you
want to be tested on, the question quality is high
(found that it matched the type of questions you would
see on the real exam) and most important there is an
analysis which helps you know the areas to focus on.
- There are also many free practice exams online (I used
examcentral.net, examspm.com and LinkedIn learning)
6) In the final week, I took at least 2 full length exams
a day to build stamina and figure how to manage my time.

PS:
1) ITTOs: did not memorize this but worked on
understanding the logic behind each and application
2) Brain dump: Praticed this daily and included the
earned value management formulas and Table 3-1 (one
which summarises the processes and knowledge areas)
3) Memory tips: Created a mnemonic to help me remember
the knowledge areas and the number of processes in each
Knowledge area.

Last but not least: you can do this!
You just need to plan, stick to the plan and remain focused.

I remember visualising the "Congratulations on passing your
PMP" at the end of my exam on Friday 6th and I like to
believe that this positive messaging (while doing the prep
Work helped)

All the best and feel free to reach out for any other help.
Regards,
Susan

Congrats and thank you for sharing your strategy! This will be helpful to others studying for the new test.

Hi Susan , thanks for sharing . Did you find many new questions on the subject matter that has been changed in the 6th edition ?

Hi Tulika,

I don't think I can answer this in terms of definite numbers.

Here is what I can say, (I had also shared it earlier as part of my strategy), strive to understand the material - whether it is the new processes, considerations in tailoring, Agile or the ITTOs. This is because the PMP exam tests you on the application of this knowledge and so you find that the questions may not outrightly ask you, for example, about 'the ITTOs for Manage Project Knowledge or Agile projects'. Instead, you will have to figure this out for yourself after carefully reading through the question. In my case, I found that having understood the material in the PMBOK 6th edition, it became easier for me to make the connection and answer the questions correctly. One last thing, take as many practice exams/questions as possible so that you can get used to the different ways in which the questions are framed.

Regards,
Susan

Ok . Thanks Susan!

Thanks. What strategy you followed for time management ? My biggest challenge is time ... unable to get it done in 4 hrs. I used to when I did mock exam for 5th edition but not for new edition.

Hi Snehal,

I know what you mean about time management. First of all, find out why you are unable to complete the exam in 4 hours. Could it be that you are spending too much time on each question? Or that you want to get every question right? Or perhaps you have not grasped the 6th edition material as well so you are struggling to respond to questions? Once you have answered that question for yourself, you are on your way to a solution.

Secondly, let me say that I also had the same challenge at the beginning and this is how I overcame it:
NB: I only took the mock exams when I felt that I had a good grasp of the material in the 6th edition and had also taken the knowledge area tests offered by the exam prep course I was using.
1) Listed all the things I needed to plan for: brain dump session (in the real exam you can only do this once the time starts), breaks and rests in between (4 hours is a long time to be seated) and time to answer all 200 questions (remember that you must answer all questions).

2) Once (1) was done I proceeded as follows:
- I would 10 to 15 minutes (max) to do the brain dump, leaving me with 230 minutes
- I would take a maximum of 1 minutes on each question (remember all questions have the same 1 mark, so if you do not know the answer, choose one and mark for review later)
- After the first 100 questions, by this time I would have 130 minutes left, I would take a ten-minute break, leaving me with 120 minutes to tackle the remaining 100 questions
- The final 20 minutes would be spent reviewing the 'marked' questions and making sure that I had completed all the questions.

For the exam, I more or less followed the same approach:
- Brain dump took me 10 minutes,
- I read each question slowly to make sure that I understood what they were asking; 'marked for review' any question I felt I wanted to relook at (but always selected one of the available responses)
- Took a 5-minute break after 100 questions
- Completed all 200 questions with 30 minutes left on the clock
- Last 30 minutes were spent reviewing the marked questions
- Completed the exam with 2 minutes to spare

Let me conclude by saying that this was my approach, which you can borrow from, but, at the end of the day figure out what works best for you since you may need more breaks in between or a longer break. Once you figure that out, practice and with time you will realise that you get better at it.

All the best,
Susan

Thanks Susan. This is really helpful!!

For Braindump - besides formulas and process table did you write anything else ?

Hi Snehal,

That's all that made it into my brain dump:-)

As I prepared for the exam, I came across articles which offered tips on what to include in the brain dump. My key takeaway from the articles is that you should customize the brain dump to suit your specific needs and includes the items you need the most help remembering.

Many folks do not use a brain dump at all, including myself. Practice writing the processes and formulas daily, every day prior to your test may be sufficient enough where it would not be needed. Everyone is different, but remember that that brain dump may eat up your time on the test.

I chose to do the brain dump, and I practiced it day after day after day before the test. I took me about 8 minutes at the beginning of the test, but for me that was time well spent. It helped me to focus and re-prime the PMP part of my brain. I still finished the exam with time to spare (and I passed), so for me this was a successful strategy. Naturally, we are all different, so your mileage may vary.

Whichever way you choose, do it that way during your practice exams so that you can tweak your process as needed.

Good luck!
Tracy

I wanted to reply to my original message regarding the 6th edition question. I finished the exam today, passed above target all areas. Had only 1 agile specific question, and only a couple need a calculator. Most were text questions about the processes. I did not do a brain dump, the couple of equations are easy to memorize. If you want to memorize some of the key processes and linkages that will be more helpful to you. Missing 2 math questions isn't going to hurt like missing 15 process questions.
Regarding PrepCast, it was spot on target for helping you get used to the exam material. The exam simulator questions are a bit more difficult than the exam in my opinion, I was scoring mid 70's on the practice exams.
I finished my first pass with about 2 hours to spare, answering all questions and marking the ones I was not sure about. Did a second pass on the marked ones, then looked back at every question. Probably changed 10 answers. Finally got tired of it and clicked END when I was reviewing question 150. Figured at that point it was a done deal. The simulator questions are great to get you used to the language, vocabulary and structure of the exam.
The user interface at my center looked like it was running on Windows XP, not as nice as Cornelius's!
Thanks to the PrepCast folks, your product is worth the money and I'll recommend you highly to anyone who asks.

Congratulations Eric!
I thought about you today and wondered how the exam went. Thank you for coming back to share your experience.

Thank you for this information. it was really helpful. I have just taken my first practice test and scored a 71.5 I was a little worried at that score, but I hope to improve. This gives me some good hope!

Congratulations Eric! Thank you for sharing your lessons learned.

Congratulations Eric! Thanks for sharing your experience.

My exam is one week away and I am confused what things I should memorize and revisit. Any advice on that ?

Hi Susan - Thanks for sharing your experience , it was really helpful .I passed my exam on 23rd April !

Congratulations!! The new exam IS PASSABLE!!!

Congratulations Tulika! Happy to have helped.

Many thanks,
Susan

Congrats! And thanks for the info! I'm taking my exam in a week and this really helped.
Did you end up memorizing all the ITTO for majority of the processes before going in to the exam? I feel like that's where I'm losing some of my marks, because I don't have it 100% memorized for some of the processes that seem really similar...trying to see what I can do in the final week to help me bring my exam simulator score up at least by 5%! Do you have any tips? Or what did you do in your last few days before the exam that you think helped? Thanks in advance!

please can you advise about the exam i take mine on June 2.
thanks

Hi,
I am taking the exam on 28th june. Do we need to read through the Agile guide which is part of the PMBoK 6th edition or is the first part sufficient? Thank you. Congrats to all who cleared the exam!!!

I didn’t read anything like that. There were no Agile specific questions. I only knew the concept and that was more than enough to get by on agile type questions.

Hi Susan,

Regarding the below two points,
4) Took all the exams at the end of each knowledge area.
5) Once I was done with a knowledge area I would take
least 100 practice questions.

What did you refer to to take exams by knowledge area? I am looking at the current prepcast exam simulator and it is all exams. Were you referring to Udemy as well?

Thanks,
Ashwini

Hi Ashwini,
Thank you for the question.
I was using a Udemy course which had practice questions at the end of each knowledge area (that is what I meant with point 4). For point 5, I used multiple sources, including the Prepcast simulator, to attempt at least 100 practice questions to test my understanding of the knowledge area I had just finished reviewing. Hope that clarifies.

All the best with your studies and the exam.

Regards,
Susan

Hi Susan,

What Udemy course and what sources did you use for practice questions??

Hello Susan,
Thanks for the above information. It is very useful. I had a confusion in mind whether to do CAPM or PMP. I am not from IT background. I'm from finance background and I don't have end to end knowledge or experience in project management. But I've transitioned 5 finance and accounts processes from client side and trained my team back in India, worked on test mode for a month and 2 months on live production mode and then go-live for a month. This was pretty much the same thing I followed for all the process that I've transitioned. I just wanted some guidance if it'll be better for me to do CAPM course first and then PMP, or I can directly do the PMP certification course. Could you please guide me through this? Or direct me to the point of contact who can help me in getting clarity on this please?

Thanks in advance!
Regards
Nishitha

Hi there,
I used a Udemy PMP prep course by Joseph Phillips. For the practice questions I used different sources including: the exam simulator by PM Prepcast, LinkedIn learning, examspm.com, simplilearn.com, projectmanagement.com and sample questions by Oliver Lehmann.

All the best,
Susan