Yeah Boy! I passed the PMP Exam… (Part 2)

April 25, 2010 · Posted in Information Systems, Life Happens, Project Management, Random Stuff, Yeah Boy! Yah Suck! 

Continued from Yeah Boy! I passed the PMP Exam… (Part 1)

Another area that concerned me the most is the fact that I can’t seem memorize the various formulas presented in the study material. I eventually developed a way to remember these formulas by trying to read them like words (sounding like a Klingon). I will explain this in another post if I get around to it. There were also the different theories in motivation and leadership. Again on top of everything else that I have been trying to jam into my noggin’ this was another bang-my-head-on-the-desk item. For this, I also developed a simple system to allow me to remember them better.
On the week of the exam, I received some really good news that got me very excited in a sense which would have been really cool if I received them in any other week, however, the good news and excitement served as a distraction and made it really hard for me to focus on the week which is typically when I do a complete “brain dump” of everything I studied.

At this point, I was basically resigned to the fact that I may not pass the exam.

The exam was a computerized 200 multiple-choice question test hosted by a company called Prometric. The beauty of this type of exam is that you immediately will know whether you pass or fail the exam on the same day. This is much unlike the CISSP and CISM exams, which still use the old-school fill-in-the-bubble-really-good-otherwise-the-machine-will-fail-your-sorry-butt paper exam. That type of exam will take 6 to 8 weeks before you find out the results and YES it is a torture not knowing.

First thing I did as I started to take the exam was to write down all the formulas and the acronyms that I made up to remember the theories in the scratch paper that was provided by the exam proctor. Only to be somewhat disappointed (peeved more like) that out of the 200 questions less than ten asked about the formulas and none asked about the theories.

The exam allows you to mark the questions that you are unsure of the answer. It was complete downer when I had to mark the first 3 questions of the exam. After that, however, I was able to pick-up my stride.

Out of the 200 questions, 25 are what the PMI calls pretest questions. These questions are not graded and used by PMI to test-out some of the questions they will introduce in the future versions of the exam. The questions are spread-out throughout the exam and there is no way of knowing which of the questions are graded and which ones are pretests. Overall, only 175 questions are graded and I need to answer 106 of the graded questions correctly (approximately 60%) to pass. Factoring the 25 non-graded questions and some using some basic math and statistical probability, I figured I can miss 69 question and still pass the exam.

The exam was 4 hours long and I finished it within 2 and a half hours, giving me time to review the questions I marked. At this point I was completely burnt-out and I just wanted to get out of there. As I went through the marked items, I was surprised that I actually marked only a total of 29 questions. So I thought if I get all these questions wrong, what is the probability that I got 40 more questions wrong from the unmarked questions? Pretty low I thought. So instead of reviewing and stress-out over the 29 questions, I trusted my gut and submitted them as my final answers. And after a few it-looks-like-Windows-is-hanging-hour-glass seconds and answering a few survey questions, I got the result that I was waiting for: “Examination Result: PASS”.

Now where is that six pack?

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