I am pleased to share that I passed the PMP exam on 26-03-2012 in my first try. I was rated proficient in all the areas except closing where I got MP.

I studied for 3 months. I used PMBOK 4th ed (3 or 4 times) and PM Prepcast (once) as the main study materials. I had ESI power prep book, slides and questions from my company but used only the slides and questions there.

I tried only the free exams on the internet like examcentral, pmstudy (1), simplilearn, Oliver L, and few others. I scored 75-85% on average on these exams.

I am into full time IT project management for a captive unit and my on job experience helped in studies and exam.

I completed the exam in 3 hrs and marked about 10 questions for review and changed only 2 in review. I just wanted to finish the exam and know the result, hence did not spend the remaining time reviewing many things.

Overall the quality of the exam questions was very good. There were many situational questions and you need to read it all and understand completely by removing unnecessary information and extracting all the required information to select the best answer. You must read and understand PMBOK. I did not memorize all the ITTOs but from the question and answers I was able to find the right choice. I mean I cannot right them all on the paper but when given as the choices for a question I would recall the right ones.

All the best to the guys who still need to pass the exam. Study well and it will pay off ! It is not a rocket science.

Regards,

Kapil Gahlot, PMP