Hello community!

I think I owe some feedback to this forum from my experience in preparing and taking the exam. I was a silent follower of this forum and this is my story (I'll try to make it short).

Last year I took the exam but I didn't prepare well, I didn't read PMBOK and instead I only read Andy Crowe's book and took the final chapter 200 practice exam and scored 90%, I said to myself I'm ready. So I went to the real exam and you guessed what happened, I failed bad with 2 MP and 3 BP. That was a deep knock out for me, it took me 4 months to pick up the study again. So on February 2014 I started studying again, but now I used this strategy:

Month 1 and 2
- Read PMBOK 5 side by side with Rita's book
- While reading both books I created an excel spreadsheet with notes covering every process, ITTO's and important topics. This notes would be very helpful later so that I could take a quick look instead of referring to the books.

Month 3
- Watched all CBT Nuggets videos
- Took Andy Crowe's chapter tests and final 200 practice test again
- Took Rita's book chapter tests
- Carefully reviewed explanations for questions I got wrong and updated my notes with new stuff learned

Month 4
- Bought two apps one for my IPOD called ITTO Game and one for my Android phone called PSA PMP 5P. These two apps really helped me grasping and remembering ITTO's.

- Took the following exam simulators including scores:

Oliver Lehman 75 questions - 66%
PM Study 1 free - 80%
Oliver Lehman 175 questions - 76%
Headfirst PMP - 81%
Simplilearn paid exam 1 - 77%
Simplilearn paid exam 2 - 70%
PMP for sure 100 questions - 66% (passed with 5 MP)
Andy Crowe 200 final chapter questions - 90% (did this in month 3 - easy questions)
Rita's book chapter tests - average 76% (did this in month 3)
Rita Fast track knowledge area tests - average 79% (around 1200 questions) I wanted to do the full PMP exam but realized the questions were the same, didn't touch SuperPMP
PMZilla 200 tough - 60%

- Carefully reviewed explanations for questions I got wrong and updated my notes with new stuff learned

Important: aside from the scores, I was taking a close look at how I was doing in each process group, it made me realize I was scoring low on Initiation and Closing, so I went back to my notes, PMBOK and Rita's book to do a high level review of these processes.

Certification exam:

I went to the San Diego CA Prometric center on June 2nd and arrived 45 minutes before my appointment (12:30), they told me I could go in earlier but said no and instead I decided to stay outside stretching and doing breathing exercises (I was really nervous). I also took care of not drinking any liquids two hours before the exam, last time I didn't do that and half through the exam I went out to the restrooms losing valuable minutes (I didn't want to happen this again).

So at 12:20 pm I went in and it was cool the prometric center had noise cancelling headphones so I really liked that. The tutorial came in and during that time I wrote down every single formula, then I started the exam. The exam had a mix of tricky questions and ones that were pretty easy, definitely the time I spent on the simulators really paid off because the questions on the exam weren't new for me. It took me 3 hours and 57 minutes to answer all questions and I didn't take any breaks, I marked around 15 questions but I didn't have time to reviewed them.... So I clicked submit and I knew the survey was coming, answer that and thought about my wife and two kids. Thankfully it showed me "Congratulations".. I was soooo happy and left the center with a big smile on my face.

I passed with 3 P's (Initiating, Executing and M&C) and 2 MP (Planning and Closing).

So that's it for me, I thank God everything is all over. Now I can spend quality time with my wife, my two year old and my 2 months old.

I hope my success story helps others as reading some of the stories helped me!