My preparation is very different from most of the LL's. My initial plan was to do 4 steps - (i) Do PM Prepcast for 35 hours training (ii) Study Rita (iii) Study PMBOK (iv) Give Mock Exams

 

But I got busy with my work and I didn't have a chance to look into PMBOK in detail. So I did the below for actual preparation

 

1. Started with PM Prepcast. Good. Provided a good understandings on the knowledge areas.

 

2. Studied Rita twice. I will not go ahead unless I fully understand a topic. I researched about each and every topic and Thanks to PMZilla I could find a lot of my questions were already answered in their forums.

 

3.I tried to find as much notes as possible in the internet. Rajesh Nair and Abhishek's notes, Rofa's notes, Sridhar's notes, Noaman Sayed's notes, Pradeep's Notes (Notes was for previous version of PMBOK. But the content is good).It took like 5 days for me to go over these notes since for each new point, I researched PMBOK and internet for additional details. Thanks to all these people for their contribution and for their hard work. 

 

I didn't attend a lot of mock tests due to the lack of time. I tried only the below ones

 

1. Rita chapter end questions - I was scoring around 80-85% in these ones.

 

2. Simplilearn Test - 77% (Gave it before going through the notes)

 

3. Christopher scordo- Exams 1-6 Scored around 80-85% and Exams 16,17,18 - 75-80%

 

4. PMStudy Test 2 - 80% (I gave it 6 days before my actual exam to assess. This is where I understood that I'm making some silly mistakes by not going through the questions properly. So I wanted to make sure I go read the questions twice in the actual exam).

 

Actual Exam:

 

In the Exam I initially went very slow. Even for the simple questions, I read the questions thrice to make sure that they are correct. After one hour I finished only 40 questions. Then in the next 2 hours I picked up some pace and finished 110 questions. In the last hour I had 50 questions to complete. I wanted to make sure I complete all the questions before the time runs out. I didn't take any breaks. I had a couple of very wordy questions in the last hour, I marked them and went ahead and finished the 200 questions with 8 minutes remaining. I came back and answered those 2 questions with only one minute left. Finally very happy to see the congrats message.

 

I'm happy with my overall preparation and progress. Thanks to PMP, I explored different areas of project management which I have never explored before. One thing I could have done better is to take atleast another 3 or 4 full mock tests. Since I just did only 2 mock tests, I was unable to pace the timing to my expected level.

 

Best of luck for Future PMP Aspirants!!!