PMP Exam Prep Tools #pmp 03

Back in March 2023, I passed my Project Management Professional exam and received my certification.  

In these posts, I want to share some of my experience before it starts to fade.  In accordance with the PMI code of ethics (and the little waiver I agreed to before taking the test) I won’t be disclosing any proprietary details.  I already shared my experience of taking the exam and covered the requirements.  

With this post, I want to share how I studied and the tools I used.   

Tools

I ended up using five tools to study:

• The PMI books
• ANKI flash card study app
• PMI.org’s Study Buddy / Study Hall
• Andrew Ramdayal’s courses (PMP Exam Prep and his practice tests on Udemy)
• PM PrepCast 

The PMI Books

Here’s a tip: If you pay for a PMI.org membership, you get ALL of the PMI publications FOR FREE.  Well, not free, per se - they're included in your membership fee.  That’s actually worth the price of joining by itself, not to mention the reduced exam fee.  

Here are the books I read, skimmed, examined, and internalized:

• PMBOK 6.0
• PMBOK 7.0
• The Agile Practice Guide 

I pulled all of my flash card definitions out of the two PMBOK guides.  The PMBOK 6.0 gives you the predictive PM process in detail with official terms and definitions for every bit of it.  The PMBOK 7.0 is much shorter, but was helpful in filling in some of the gaps I kept encountering.  

The Agile Practice Guide was essential for understanding the PMI perspective of Agile.  The biggest challenge was to understand the MINDSET of project management in a world where there are numerous ways to run a project.  PMBOK 7 + The Agile Practice Guide provided a good overview of the considerations in this space.  

ANKI Flash Card App

I did some quick research to locate a decent flash card app for studying terms, and ANKI was the winner.  It was an irreplaceable asset for cramming everything PMP into my mind, once I got over the learning curve for how to use it.  The best thing about ANKI is that once you reveal the answer for your flash card, you can assign a value for how well you remembered it, and it will rank it accordingly.  If you nailed it, you won’t see the card for awhile.  If you whiffed, then you could bring it back up in a couple minutes.  It REALLY worked!

I ended up with 670 flash cards when I was finally done studying.  I began by entering all of the facts you have to know - like the names of the PMI process groups, knowledge areas, and processes, not to mention the dozens of documents, project artifacts, and terms.  Then, as I took practice tests, every time I answered a question incorrectly, I added more cards.  Not every incorrect answer resulted in a card, but many of them did.  The Gulf of Evaluation, Fist of Five, Attribute Sampling, and histograms vs. pareto charts (and 20 other types of charts you might need to know) all drive you to create hundreds of flash cards.  

I recommend you create your own deck instead of getting someone else’s, as the act of writing out the flash cards seems to help with memorization.  

But, the PMP exam isn’t about memorization.  Unlike any test I’ve ever taken, it was 100% focused on application.  You have to know the facts, but the exam will test your ability to APPLY the PM mindset in very specific scenarios.  

To this end, I employed a number of test simulators to both practice the exam and learn as I made mistakes in a consequence-free environment.  

Andrew Ramdayal’s Practice Exams

Andrew Ramdayal’s PMP Exam Prep course on Udemy includes three 180-question practice exams.  These were the first practice exams I took, and they were pretty challenging.  Some of the questions contained typos or were missing information that was assumed by the author, and so it could be frustrating at times.  But it was a great learning tool that helped me wrap my head around the PMP basics.  I also purchased Mr. Ramdayal’s stand-alone additional four PMP practice exams from Udemy.  

The challenge with any practice exam is that you learn how to answer the questions the way the test writer asks the questions.  Mr. Ramdayal has a mindset and a specific way of seeing the world, and this seeps into his practice exams.  It’s not his fault - there’s nothing anyone can do to avoid this.  Once you learn the way he thinks, you start getting better at his exams, but you may not be getting any closer to passing the actual exam.  

After taking eight of his practice exams - and now the actual exam - my opinion is that he heavy on PMBOK 6.0 and predictive models.  This is good, because you DO need to know these things.  However, he’s light on Agile questions and development approach selection, which is a significant portion of the PMI body of knowledge.  That just means you’re going to need more tools.  

PMI.org’s Study Hall

I HATE the PMI Study Hall.  If your goal is to feel stupid and inadequate, then the Study Hall is for you!  

The PMI Study Hall was the first study tool I subscribed to after I completed my 35 PDUs.  I thought, “It’s made by PMI - the folks who provide the certification.  It’ll probably have the most accurate representation of what of it’s like to take the PMP exam.”  Wrong. It is far more difficult than the actual exam, and maddeningly inconsistent.  Andrew Ramdayal warned that some study tools would be discouraging and make you feel like you were failing.  He never said which tool, but I’m guessing he was referring to the PMI Study Hall.  

As far as I could tell, the Study Hall has a massive set of study questions that are curated from the many volunteers who work for PMI.org (a non-profit organization).  You would be asked a fairly straightforward question, but then the answer would be unexpected, even contradictory, to the official PMI materials. When you looked at the source, they were citing an article buried deep within the PMI website - not even an official source.  As a study tool, this was frustrating. 

I spent an hour and a half one day combing methodically through the Project Communications Management section of the PMBOK 6.0 guide, taking notes and writing out all of the inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs associated with each process.  I then immediately went to the PMI Study Hall and took the Communications Management quiz and got 55%!  How discouraging!  

The questions were tagged with difficulty levels.  It felt like if you ever have a question labeled “expert” level, just look at the multiple choice answers and choose the one that DISAGREES with the PMBOK guides and you’ll probably be correct.  

So, did I put the PMI Study Hall on here just to complain?  No.  It turns out that if you can divorce your emotions from the results the PMI Study Hall gives you, you’ll actually get a better feel for what the actual exam is like.  The actual exam is harder than any of the other tools I used, but not as hard as the PMI Study Hall.  Think of the PMI Study Hall as “leg day” at the gym, only if someone were standing and making fun of you the entire time you did your leg presses.  Weirdly, the PMI Study Hall actually DID help me prepare for the exam, but the cost was unnecessary emotional distress and a whole lot of profanity.  

"Thank you" to whoever posted the random comment I encountered on a Reddit article where someone else vented their frustration with the PMI Study Hall.  You said if I was consistently getting 55% on the PMI Study Hall, then I was probably going to pass the test.  I was getting 63%, and you were right!

PM PrepCast

In the end, just a few weeks before the exam, I bought a three-month subscription to PM PrepCast for the PMP exam simulator for $150.  This was money well spent.  It was the most commonly cited simulator mentioned in positive reviews across the web.  

Where Andrew Ramdayal’s questions were light on Agile, the PrepCast Simulator provided a well-balanced diet of development approaches.  This was most helpful in wrapping my mind around PMI’s internalization of Agile principles.  

However, I found that I was able to quickly learn the question-asking rubric of Cornelius Fichtner (the creator of the simulator), and was regularly scoring 80% - 90% on quizzes by the time I was finished.  Regardless, his tool was incredibly helpful and I wish I'd started with it.  

At the time of this writing, the PrepCast PMP Exam Simulator had nearly 2,300 questions, and I was able to get through 48% of them.  You’re able to do quizzes where you can specify only unanswered questions, which is huge.  You want as many fresh questions as you can get, and the PM PrepCast had the best system for never seeing the same question twice.  I highly recommend it. 

If you only have money for one subscription, I recommend the PM PrepCast.   

With all these tools, I found the difficulty level of the actual PMP exam to be close to as difficult as PMI Study Hall’s “difficult” questions, as perplexing as some of Andrew Ramdayal’s more confusing questions, and slightly MORE difficult than the PM PrepCast Exam Simulator.  

I passed, so these are the tools that worked for me.  I have a sense that it was the combination of all of the tools that really helped be able to adopt the PMP mindset, which is the essential task you must complete if you want to pass the actual exam. 

Good luck!