I passed my PMP® exam on 1/12/19 through God’s divine intervention and a lot of hard work but I’m sure your students are only interested in the ‘hard work’ part of it so here goes…
My journey began on Jan 15th, 2018 and ended on Jan 12th, 2019. (I do NOT recommend this time-frame for anyone) but mine took longer because I slacked during the year and life got in the way.
Anyway, I started off by taking a prep class, after that I was only about 40% ready.
So I took another one but still wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I have to point out that both of these courses are accredited by PMI so it wasn’t that the information wasn’t good…I just wasn’t grasping it the way I should.
Thankfully, they were both cheap. In between the 1st and the 2nd course I read the PMBOK®, I personally think they should let criminals read the PMBOK® as punishment instead of going to jail!
Yes, the PMBOK® is a BORE to read! Part of the reason this journey took so long is because of how long it took me to finish the PMBOK®.
Then in the middle of Nov 2018, I found ExamsPM’s course on YouTube. Helena kept repeating over and over how you can follow her course and get your PMP® in 6 weeks.
I told myself, I’m going to do EVERYTHING she tells me to do and if I don’t pass I’ll get my money back.
When I first signed up, I was only interested in the practice questions as I felt that I had already gone through 2 similar courses but since I determined to do whatever Helena had instructed, I went through the whole course then I noticed the difference between the ExamsPM course and the others…it was the way Helena taught the course!
All the concepts that I had struggled to understand SUDDENLY made sense to me.
When I completed the course, I took the practice questions..I was scoring between 69 – 71%. I kept practicing more questions. At this point, it was that I wasn’t understanding the concepts but mostly the situational questions were the ones getting me stumped (mainly because I tend to overthink things).
I prayed that on the actual exam day I wouldn’t get too may situational questions…I don’t think God heard me.
I kept doing more practice questions, between ExamsPM and other paid plus free online practice questions…I practiced over 3,200 questions before the day of exams.
I scored 88% on my last practice test…that was my highest yet.
ACTUAL EXAM DAY
I went to bed early the night before as I had read on all the blogs but I was so nervous I woke up 3 hours later and couldn’t go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried.
That meant by the time I sat down at 8 am to write the exam I had been up for 8 hours already and was starting to feel the fatigue.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the questions were really HARD…mostly situational questions (like I mentioned before, God must not have heard my prayer ?) and with ALL the practice I had done, I felt stumped by the questions right from the get go, I started to panic BUT i tried to remember every tip I had read, I guessed an answer if I wasn’t sure, marked it for review and moved on.
I completed the 200 questions in 3 hours and 40 mins but I had marked a lot for review so I went back to those and tried to take my time to understand the questions. I was able to go through about 10 to 12 of those before time run out.
At this point, I really had no idea how I did and that stupid 2 minute survey before they show the result seemed like the longest wait in my life BUT suddenly the screen popped up with CONGRATULATIONS and all that stress was worth every minute.
So, to sum up: Here is why I will recommend ExamsPM:
1. Helena really breaks down the PMBOK® and makes it easy to understand – That PMBOK® was obviously designed by a mean person who is probably in hell and laughing out loud anytime someone attempts to read it.
2. This course is the only one I’ve seen so far that offers the free review of the PMI application – that was such a great help. I incorporated all the suggestions on my application and got approved without any audit.
3. Helena and her staff are responsive to the students’ questions and that helped to alleviate a lot of the stress for me.
4. Can you really pass the PMP® in 6 weeks? – YES YOU CAN. If you take out the time it took for me to hear back from PMI (because i submitted my application during the holidays it took longer than 5 days for me to hear from them)…it took me EXACTLY 6 weeks from the time I signed up for this course to when I got my PMP®.
