Thank you Anjani for sharing your story, and congratulations for passing your PMP exam!

Congratulations and thanks for the write up! I'm writing the exam tomorrow, Dec. 22nd. I cannot imagine how good it must feel to see those words of congratulations on the screen !!!! Cheers!

I can't believe it !
The struggle is over after over 200hours of study. Passed the exam on Dec. 19th - Proficient on Initiating, Planning, Executing and Moderately Proficient on Monitoring&Controlling and Closing.

My primary references were:
- PMBOK
- The PMP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try / Edition 5 by Andy Crowe,
- Achieve PMP Exam Success, 5th Edition: Guide for the Busy Project Manager
- PMPrepcast
- RMC, 5th edition (old one that I borrowed from my friend)

Studied the PMBOK and heard to all the lessons on Prepcast early Jan the first time, then I got so busy at a very high profile project at work that I couldn't get back to it until Oct.
Oct.1st is when I started preparing again seriously, I got my 35contact hr certificate and then submitted my application.
PMPrepcast free experience verification spreadsheet was very helpful in filling out the application efficiently.
Well, my application got approved after 8days of submission and then when I went to pay, it got selected for the audit.
I was dejected a bit but then just followed all the instructions for the paperwork - I only had one manager all through the past three years of experience, hence it was easy and he signed off all the docs, sealed them and gave them back to me. I sent all the paperwork (it was right around ThanksGiving) the next day. I received the audit cleared after about 5days which is when I registered for the test.

I had been studying all this time since Oct. 1st, 3-4 hrs every weekday and 8-10hrs on weekend.
My advice is - RMC's process chart and questions were the closest to what I saw on the test.
90% of the questions were scenario based with - what could have been done to prevent it, what to do next, what to do first, what process is it in?
Memorization of ITTO is not necessary but understanding their use and where would it apply is very important. As far as I can remember, there were only 2/3 questions which were straightforward ITTO's, all others were scenario based.
Andy Crowe's was a good refresher that i went through twice, PMBOK three times, and Achieve PMP success one time but worked all the tests in the book and online.

One mistake that I did during the test was around the 50th question, I hit the Review button instead of Mark.
My only option to get back to the test was to hit "Review incomplete questions". This mode didn't let me go back to the previous answered question as i was answering new questions. So, I started taking notes on which questions I probably should review if I have time since I also didn't want to mark too many.
Well, after all of that, I did not really have any time to review the marked questions or the noted ones, completed exactly on time and then completed the test center review, kept my fingers crossed and hit the complete button.
In a couple of seconds, came the results - PASS and my joy didn't know bounds.

Hope this helps, good luck to you all.

Anjani Baswa