Hi everyone,
I passed my exam yesterday. Here are the resources that worked for me.
PMPrepcast Exam Simulator (Absolutely must, this is extremely helpful). I did bout 900 questions in the simulator. Don't be discouraged by lower scores. Instead, like many others have said, look at the questions you got wrong and understand why you got them wrong. I took 3 full exams in the simulator and never got higher than 73% but still passed my PMP exam. I took dozens of quizzes though and the learning quizzes helped to check my answers quickly.
Andrew Ramdayal's PMP Exam Prep Simplified: This book is a must as well. Andrew was able to take the PMBOK and explain it to me in a way that I could understand it. Highly recommend his book.
PMA Bootcamp Yes it's expensive, but this bootcamp also saved me another valuable resource: TIME. PMA gives their students powerpoint slides that make it easy to learn the pmbok. Call me a nerd, but I taped up all these powerpoint slides, in order of process and knowledge area, around my entire apt. Yes this is extreme, but guess what, it helped me tremendously. Here's why... When I would get questions on the exam in let's say, risk, for example. I would see a question about Tornado or Sensitivity analysis and remember that it was from the Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis area because I remember where I was reading about in that particular area of my apartment. "Oh yeah, I remember reading that near my coffee table. It can't be identify risk because my notes for that are closer to my refrigerator." Like I said, this may not work for everyone, but it really helped me to be able to recall information by remembering where I read about it in my apt.
Aileen Ellis's free videos on YouTube: These were very helpful for quick learning on certain subjects
Aileen Ellis's EVM Pocketbook (purchase for $8 on Amazon): If you can do 80% of the questions in this book, you should be fine for the exam. The book should only take you 2-3 hrs to complete
Ricardo Vargas' Process video: I thought this video was good, don't get me wrong, but I struggled to find the "WOW" that everyone else raves about. It is good though and definitely worth watching one time.
DO NOT read the pmbok. That's my advice. I picked up the many PMBOK many times to reference material. But I never read it all the way through. Waste of time when I could be focusing on processes and key terms.
For CP: Just know that ES +DURATION -1 = EF (forwards and use high number) and that LF - DURATION +1 = LS (backwards and use low number). Know that LS-ES = FLOAT and LF-EF = FLOAT. If you can memorize those, you'll be good. Also know that CP is the path with the highest number of durations and that it has 0 float.
The exam: The exam is easier than the simulator. Mine had many questions with clear answers compared to the simulator which had very difficult questions. Also, the questions are less wordy on the exam than the simulator. My particular exam was extremely heavy on change requests, stakeholder comm and comm mgmt. Know how communication mgmt and stakeholder mgmt knowledge areas work together.
Special thanks to simulator and all the tools that helped me passed. Good luck and don't be scared of the exam. It is not easy, but remember that you can miss a few and still pass.
