Jonathan,

Congratulations on passing your exam!

Thank you for sharing your success and lessons learned. We are glad to hear that our products helped you prepare for and pass your exam.

Good luck in all your future endeavors!

I said I passed on the first attempt but the reality was that it was on the 1.1th attempt!! The first attempt at the end of July was aborted after about 30 mins since the software in the test centre crashed and the systems couldn't be recovered!! It meant that I had to reschedule the exam for free. And with hindsight this was a great thing because of the following....

1) It meant that I got to travel to the test centre, see it, feel it....see what the computers are like, feel how the mouse is, be aware of the procedure prior to the exam and being in the exam room with all the ambient noises etc. I think being in the exam room for the second time yesterday relaxed me a little bit as I was going into an environment that I had already seen a few weeks before. Doing prep through an online course does not prepare you at all for the surroundings that you will face in a test centre. If there is any way for candidates to visit a centre prior to the exam I would recommend it.

2) I also realise that the prep I had done with another company did not really prepare me for the exam. The other company had lots of grammatical errors in the questions and the explanations for the answers were pretty woeful. PM PrepCast was excellent in that regard and I cannot recommend them highly enough. I really liked the deep explanations to the correct answer and the 3 or 4 incorrect answers and why they were wrong. I am soooo pleased that after the first aborted attempt I bought the exam simulator package with PrepCast.

3) Despite using PM PrepCast and the other company, I still found the exam very challenging and long. In preparation I was able to complete the practice exams with 15-20 mins to spare (73% to 77% scores). Reality yesterday was quite different....first two sections went pretty well but the time pressure in the last section built up and only finished with about 2 mins to spare. Due to the time pressure I felt as though I was rushing through the last 25-30 questions and continuously looking at the countdown clock rather than fully focussing on the questions in front of me. (Ironically maybe this was good for me???? And I just took the first gut feeling answer that came to me - I guess I will never know!!). Clearly do not spend a lot of time on one particular question. If not answered after a couple of mins move on.

4) In terms of the questions themselves, I felt as though the text was often quite long and took a couple of attempts to read them. The ability to highlight text and strikeout ("obvious" wrong) answers I found very useful. I was surprised that there were no calculations at all in my exam (no EAC, CPI, SPI, TCPI, Total Float, Duration etc etc) despite being prepared for them from the PrepCast exams. I felt as though nearly all the questions were "situational" questions rather than "which of the following is an output from process ABC" etc etc. As predicted by PrepCast a lot of the time two answers were often very similar/applicable so sometimes having to go with my gut for the "best" answer was a challenge. I especially found the questions where you had to drag and drop 4/5 choices from the boxes on the left to solutions on the right hard. Again a lot of text and often the answer boxes seemed similar.

5) Throughout the whole exam I never "knew" if I had the correct answer or not and this is a feeling I didn't like. With my background and the types of courses/exams that I've done in the past I've always had a good feeling (or not) about the exam. Yesterday I had no clue if I was going to pass or not.

Pressing that final "end exam" button was horrible but for me....it turned into a positive result. And a big sigh of relief.

Hope my comments/feedback helped a bit and good luck to any candidates taking their exams in the near future.