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Reply: Passed on First Attempt with 5 ATs. Harder than expected!

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Topic History of : Passed on First Attempt with 5 ATs. Harder than expected!

Max. showing the last 6 posts - (Last post first)
4 years 4 months ago #19154

Kelly Mckane

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Thank you John! I'm definitely relaxing. Ran formulas and a few quizzes just to keep my mind in the zone. Making a fabulous dinner and will hit the bed early. Fingers crossed. Thank you for you insights!
4 years 4 months ago #19150

John C Bates III

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Hi Kelly,
Get some sleep!
I didn't have any "name the guy behind the theory" questions, but I know every test is different. I had a number of questions testing my understanding of the different risk responses (to positive or negative risk). My last hours were focussed on trying to remember some of the main outputs to processes and thumbing through the glossary to see if there were terms I was unfamiliar with.

I hope you do great.
John
4 years 4 months ago #19149

Kelly Mckane

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Congrats John! I test tomorrow morning. What would be your one word of advice to "lightly" work on tonight? I'm a big believer that crashing the night before doesnt work. But I've been focusing on the math formulas and the process dump. I'm glad to see you say that you feel that was almost a bad use of time, because I've been wondering if using time for that was wise. Did you find alot of "who said that" Theory type of questions? I notice I struggle for instance the Hygiene or Maslows factors and who was behind them.
4 years 4 months ago #19139

John C Bates III

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Honestly, I was shocked to see "congratulations" on the screen at the end of the exam! I was more surprised to see five "above target"s on my report. My project management experience has been as a trainer in the non-profit sector (conference organization, training content writing, etc) so much of the PM context of manufacturing/software was new to me. So, it took a lot. I worked on preparing for about 6 months, averaging 2 hours/day.
Here's what I'd do again and advise
1. Use the exam simulator! Over the course of about a month, after most of my content studying, I answered over 90% of the 1610 questions in the simulator and reviewed all my misses. I took the full timed simulated exam three times. This was important because it gave me a sense for the rapid pace that you have to keep and the mental discipline to get through it in four hours.
2. I memorized the EVM formulas and the whole processes chart.
3. I wrote the formulas on a brain dump.

What I wouldn't do again:
1. I used some of the test time (8 minutes) to recreate the process chart as part of my brain dump. While it was good to memorize, I didn't refer to the chart more than once or twice on the exam and I BARELY had time to finish the test. I took no breaks and didn't have time to review any questions. I finished question 200 with 5 seconds to spare. I could have used that 8 minutes to review or have a bit of buffer.

I'm grateful it's behind me and look forward to putting it to good use.

John

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)®

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