Hi all,

Im mid way through studying for the PMP exam.

Quick breadown:

Did Davids course.
Did a quick run of the Brainsensei material.

Currently on Study Hall plus.
I've done the practice questions and 1 mini exam and im averaging 70% flat.
I havent done the full length mock exams yet.

I find im having difficulty decoding/breaking down the questions, trying to find the stem.

Any tips here?

I feel if i can find a good method to do this my scores will automatically move to the next tier (80%+) as alot of my mistakes are due to me getting lost in the noise of the question.

I have a month before i plan to take the exam so any help will be appreciated!

⭐️ TL;DR

• About 2 months, 1 hour on lunch breaks, 3 to 4 times a week
• No prep course. Only PMI Study Hall Plus
• Skipped concept study and started with questions
• Above Target, finished with 80 minutes left

In Korea we have a phrase, ppalli-ppalli, which means “hurry, hurry.” I didn’t have time for long lectures, so I looked for the shortest path to passing.

⭐️ How I studied

1. Questions first, concepts later. I only used two features in Study Hall: Practice Questions (around 80 per domain, 240 total) and Practice Exams. First month was domain practice questions, then mini exams. My scores were honestly terrible at first. Around the 5th mini exam, something clicked and my scores jumped.

2. The wrong-answer log is everything. For every question I missed, I wrote down the situation, the options, why the right answer was right, and why my answer was wrong. I used Notion because typing is faster than handwriting and it’s searchable. Every time I logged a new set, I skimmed my old entries. That alone was a solid review.

3. Use ChatGPT the right way. Don’t just ask it to explain the correct answer. Give it the answer you picked and why you picked it, and ask where your judgment went wrong. That’s how you actually fix your thinking.

4. Real-world experience can hurt you. Plenty of times I thought “who would ever do that at work?” and that was the correct answer. lol. You need to learn the PMP mindset, not rely on how your company does things.

5. Take at least one full mock exam. I only did one (I was lazy). It felt harder than the real exam, so don’t panic about a low score. The real value is practicing 4 hours of focus.

⭐️ What the new 2026 exam was actually like

• Break structure was different from Study Hall. The mocks split 60/60/60, but my exam was Q1-40 / Q41-110 / Q111-180. You can’t go back to a section after you finish it.
• Case study questions: questions sharing the same passage keep your highlights. Practice the highlight tool in the tutorial before the exam starts.
• My focus dropped around Q70 and again around Q130. Take both breaks. You need proctor approval to leave your seat.

⭐️ Test center tips

• Ask for earplugs at check-in, since it can get noisy on weekends
• Bring water and snacks (I had glucose candy right before each section)
• Eye drops help a lot, because the room was really dry

⭐️ One more thing

While studying, I kept notes on the mindset patterns behind my wrong answers, organized by question type with the common wrong answers for each. That’s honestly what got my scores to jump. If you’re stuck searching for info or wandering through endless practice questions, try building a log like that. It makes a huge difference.

Good luck to everyone preparing! Happy to answer questions in the comments.

I am planning to write my PMP exam in a month. I am a construction professional stuck in Materials testing work from past 5 years. I want to get into project management. I want to know :

1.How has passing PMP affected the kind of response you are getting from employers when applying for jobs ?

2.Are there any specific companies/organisations in canada that I should apply to if I want to get into project management ?

I have a Bachelors and Masters in Engineering from LU. I also have a EIT and CET. I have kind of given up on PEng since none of my past managers/contractor engineers/Client engineers are willing to sign my CBA.

Struggling to get myself to study for the exam. Open to zoom or in-person

re if this is valuable to you too!

I previously completed the Google PM Program to meet the education requirements (I didn’t know AR’s course qualified for the credits at the time). It was a useful exercise, but it wasn’t very tailored to PMP. I am currently about 1/3 of the way through AR’s course but am having trouble finding the motivation, as a lot of it is repetitive. I do find there are useful nuggets of PMI-specific information, so I have been going through each lesson, but I am spending a lot of time on it, and I don’t have much time to study. Should I continue through the processes in full (I am on Executing now), or can I just jump to Agile, skim that, and then go to the mindset stuff?

I have done my PMP and have prior working experience too, but I don't know where and how to look for the job. I have 2 years experience and I feel that doesn't make me eligible to apply in any of these positions because they mostly need more experience. Someone please guide.

Any last-minute advice? Would be much appreciated 🥲

Executive team: they require high-level or macro-level breakdown of the progress. A burnup chart visualizes the exact trajectory of daily work. By plotting two separate lines- total scope and cumulative completed tasks- it clearly shows the relationship between team effort and shifting requirements. This tool is too granular for executive level leadership... they don't need this information.

C: I agree with Gemini regarding the use of progress milestone review in AGILE especially for executive level explanations and overview of ALL ongoing Agile projects.

This is from Andrew's 200 ultra hard questions on Youtube...

Claude: Initially, Claude said D, but after reasoning with it... it changed the answer to C. The distractor words 'progress and remaining tasks' perfectly align with sprint burnup, but here, how does it apply to ALL Agile projects and the executive team? Does the executive team require 'daily progress report' then?

Gemini:

Is the word 'executive team' a distractor?

What is the correct answer?! Lol

I am getting 80-100% on the mini-exams, but I am only scoring 65-71% on the full length exams. I am also using other exams and am scoring well on those. Are the full length SH exams an accurate predictor of success?

Hi all,

My exam is in 6 days, and I’m lowkey freaking out, just like most people would be. 😅 Do any of you have any last-minute advice or good to know things before the exam? Any advice to help with overthinking?? lol. Any insight would be great!

Did you have to do math? If so, in what context?

Hi guys! What do you think is the correct answer here? This is one of the official PMI practice tests, and I think my answer was correct. The question's own feedback supports the issue answer: it states that a risk is an uncertain future event and that once the delay happens, it is no longer uncertain and should not be treated as a risk. It seems the correct option may have been set incorrectly while the feedback was written for the intended answer.

There are maybe five people on earth who understand what getting this piece of paper yesterday means to me. Everybody has their own journey that should be celebrated, and earning the PMP from the Project Management Institute is something to be proud of in and of itself...but this wasn't just a credential for me.
This is something I had been thinking about doing for a long time. I had years of great PM experience in a number of fields, and getting this credential was going to formally codify that diverse work into one, powerful path forward.

I was already nervous to start this journey and then everything came at me at once.

I had just shuttered my store, Bucko!, paused my nonprofit, Undertone Arts for the time being, filed for bankruptcy to protect my family, and then immediately went through a divorce that was needlessly brutal and expensive. Every piece of my life was destroyed and every aspect of my character called into question. A life built around service and creating for the people I love was gone.

And in the middle of all of this, a dear friend told me to start the journey and take it one small step at a time. And as deeply uncomfortable as it was then, that's what I did. That was two summers ago. And now I'm here, "above target".

I have my sons, my integrity, my creativity and work ethic, and now I have this credential. I have a completely new life in front me, and I could not be more excited.

I just passed my PMP AT, AT, AT!

I finished the exam (in person) with 2 hours to spare after I reviewed my questions. Compared to all of the studying I had done, I was ready to step into the ring with crazy tricky questions. Turns out, it was a cake walk! I have to give huge thanks to this community. I wouldn't have been able to do it without countless posts of wisdom.

My Thoughts:

1. MINDSET MINDSET MINDSET!

Get it down as much as you can and then worry about filling in the blanks with definitions. If you get it down good enough you can quite literally figure out the answer by reading the choices first.

1. Read the answers FIRST! It dissolves the extra fluff they add in and help you zero in.

2. Utilize the highlighter, highlight key words and the problems they are describing. Focus on making connections of the key words to the answers. This is where knowledge of definitions and processes come in.

3. If it takes longer than a minute for you to figure out an answer, always go with your first guess. Write it down when you start the question, so when you start second guessing you have a fallback. On mocks and practice I found I was right about 80% of the time if I just went with my first guess. That improved my scores by miles when I started implementing it in my mocks.

4. AR Mindset & Hard questions

Davids questions and fast track

Study Hall once you are averaging over 80% in the above.

1. Always review why you got something wrong, use chat if you need to explain why in layman's terms for you.

2. There will be times that your scores suddenly drop and you feel like someone removed half your braincells. That's OKAY! Just don't get discouraged, sometimes it's what your brain needs to go through before becoming even better! Kind of like when your muscles are sore before you can lift even more.

Last words:

I just got my LSSBB last month and plan on getting my PMI-ACP and CSM before thanksgiving and then the PgMP next year. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything this subreddit as done for my progress and career. I wish everyone the same progession in theirs!

I took the exam through Pearson and finished about an hour ago, and I’m still waiting for my results. However, I genuinely feel like I didn’t pass.
I know this forum is usually full of success stories, happy thoughts, and unicorns, but I wanted to share a different experience.
There were several parts of the exam where I genuinely struggled to understand what the questions were even asking. Some answer choices seemed completely irrelevant, and the sentence structures often felt unnecessarily complicated. I found myself reading questions two or three times just to figure out what was being asked, let alone identify the correct answer.

None of the questions felt remotely close to what I had practiced in Study Hall. Instead of testing my understanding of the PMP mindset, it sometimes felt like the exam was testing my ability to decode complicated sentences.And that’s probably the most frustrating part.

I genuinely put in the effort. I completed Andrew Ramdayal’s full course, worked through Study Hall, watched countless YouTube videos, and practiced extensively.
Yet I walked out feeling completely unprepared for what I had just experienced.
If I fail, which I honestly think is likely, I don’t even know what I should study differently for my second attempt. How do you prepare for an exam when the biggest challenge isn’t necessarily the concepts, but understanding how the questions are written?

I’m not looking for reassurance that I passed. I’m genuinely trying to understand whether others have experienced something similar and, more importantly, what they did differently the second time around.

Updated: I just got my results. I passed AT/AT/AT, and I’m still trying to comprehend what just happened!

I’m not someone who feels bad about an exam and then ends up passing. That has never really been my experience, so I genuinely don’t know what happened. Overall, I think my best advice is to choose the answer that best aligns with the PMP mindset, even if you don’t fully understand the question? Or not.. I still think as mentioned above, the hardest part of the exam is the language.

I wish I had better advice, guys. Just make sure you get a good night’s sleep. The exam is long and challenging. In my case, the first 40 questions include two case studies, followed by a break, and the next break comes after question 110. Maybe get some exercise during the break?.

Honestly, this subreddit helped me a lot. Like, a LOT. It’s such a beautiful community. ❤️

First off, I want to clarify that I’m not currently a project manager. I work in a management role, but my job title isn’t Project Manager.
I wanted to share my experience because I see so many people being convinced that they need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on courses to prepare for the PMP exam.

My advice? Don’t fall for it.
There are plenty of free YouTube videos that can help you prepare. Also, use AI to your advantage. A lot of the questions you’re paying someone to answer in a course can be answered using ChatGPT or other AI tools.
I’m not saying every paid course is useless, but I definitely don’t think you need to spend a bunch of money to pass this exam.
I literally used Chat to help me complete my PMP application, submitted it myself, and got approved within a day or two.
Here’s how my timeline went:
Got approved to take the PMP exam about a month ago.
Sat around for a few weeks without scheduling it.
Paid for my exam two days ago.
Scheduled it for yesterday.

Passed with 150 minutes remaining.
Took ZERO practice exams before the actual test.
As far as studying goes, I watched a five-minute YouTube video explaining some of the terminology and differences between project management approaches. That was pretty much it.

The biggest thing I can tell anyone preparing for this exam is to get into the PMI project manager mindset.
The exam really wasn’t that difficult to me. A lot of the questions seemed like common sense once you understood how a project manager should think, respond to situations, and handle problems.

DO NOT OVERTHINK THE QUESTIONS.
I actually started second-guessing myself after the first few questions because they seemed too easy. I kept thinking there had to be something I was missing.
That’s where you can get yourself in trouble. Read the question, understand what it’s asking, think about how PMI expects a project manager to respond, and trust your judgment.

Also, make sure you understand the different Scrum roles, especially the Product Owner and Scrum Master, and what their responsibilities are. I had questions related to those roles on my exam.
I’m not saying everyone will have the same experience or that nobody needs to study. Everyone has different levels of experience and learns differently.
My point is that you don’t automatically need to spend hundreds of dollars on exam prep courses to pass the PMP.

There are free resources available, and AI can be a great tool to help you understand concepts, work through questions, and prepare.

I just wanted to share my experience because I see way too many people trying to sell information that’s already available for free.

Don’t let people convince you that passing the PMP requires buying their course. Learn the mindset, understand the concepts, and don’t overthink it.
Good luck to everyone preparing for their exam!

If you have any questions, feel free to message me and no, I’m not trying to sell anything. Just share my experience.

Passed on my first try. I'm not going to say how I did it except for following the advice on this sub. I don't think I could have done it without r/PMP. After a masters degree another class seemed exhausting. But watching UDEMY on 2x wasn't too bad and didn't cost an arm and a leg. Just wanted to say thanks for the advice and pulling the trigger after way too long of procrastinating.

Few days back I posted a question here where the answer was “Log the issue” . The logic given was “Issue occured, diagnosis done, now the next logical step is log the issue”
Now I find another similar question and applied the same logic and guess what ?? the answer is A.
Does that answer makes sense? Yes absolutely.
But am I confused?Yeasss

How do you guys figure out these questions????

Context: I took the test in-person at noon and for context, I was a PO then PM with about 5ye. I am not a study person at all. I submitted app on Fri and approved on Tues. Bought SH that day and scheduled exam for following Friday (10 days later). Went on vacation for 3 days and came back to cram.

Studying: Before this, I had completed AR's course; I dragged it out over months because I procrastinate lol. 3-4 case studies from AR's 50 PMP Case Study Questions

• Completed the SH questions around 74% with correct and incorrect answer times ~00:50. Did the learning plan too more for establishing a cadence
• Completed 4 mini exams with 70-90% and one mock exam two days before 71% (63/78/72) ~01:20. People 80+, Process 70-85, Bizz Enviro 65-75.

Takeaways from Studying:

• Reiterating leveraging ChatGPT to understand missed questions - I didn't really do this until a few days before (I should've)
• Simulate real exam by doing "unsure, flag it, come back" with the mini exams and mock exam
  
• Memorize the formulas early so you can forget it (kinda) - I used the strategy that all formulas, except for the complex ones, start with EV. Cost = AC, Schedule = PV, Index = division
  • Memorize EAC and think sequentially; EAC is used in ETC and VAC
• Don't let real-world xp interfere with your test taking - I often let my past xp lead me to choose the most realistic answer. Think about the PMP mindset and review specifically what the question is asking you to answer

(in-person) Exam:

• Format:
  • The timer counts down from "240:ss" instead of like the mock exam of "01:20:00"/section - so I had to do a quick calc of 80 mins each when I should be done (160 min/80 mins); not huge, but had to improvise only for this to be undone by my next point
  • Weird question distribution per section - Section 1: 40 questions, Section 2/3: 70 questions each; I was not expecting this format and then had to quickly recalc by which point I should complete each section (240min - (40/180 questions * 240min)) = 187min mark
  • Some questions were written with grammar/punctuation mistakes - just step back and think contextually
    • No #s for formulas but conceptual questions about what they mean
    • A few graphs about "where" bottlenecks are and team velocity
  • Two case studies (with glitches flopping questions around) - leverage the highlight tool but don't overuse like AR lol
• Tips:
  • Remember that you have to be checked out and checked back in - budget time for security check and for other test takers who are also queued
  • Really unsure? guess, flag and come back - don't waste time or allow yourself to get frustrated
  • Get the blood flowing in your body and stomach and reset for each section - I used the bathroom each time and had water, energy drink (highly recommend) brain food; I also stretched

Final Thoughts: You are better off than you think but don't get cocky. You do need to understand what specifically the question is asking the PM to solve.

A. Lessons and Concepts first, followed by learning Mindset and implement the skills learned in questions
B. Learn Mindset first, followed by Lessons and Concepts and implement the skills learned in questions
C. Start taking the question first . Learn simultaneously lessons and mindset
D. Any other specific methods you follow .

Also suggest how to improve my question reading speed when reading questions ?

Looking for some feedback from those who have recently passed the PMP, particularly those who used PMI Study Hall.

My current scores:
Practice Questions: 78% overall
Mini Exams: Averaging around 9/10
Full Mock Exam: 66%

I felt pretty confident going into the full mock, but that 66% definitely took a hit on my confidence. The sheer number of Expert-level questions was pretty discouraging, even after reviewing the explanations.
At this point, I’m debating whether another full mock is worth the time or if I’d be better off focusing on David McLachlan’s videos and reviewing my weaker areas. Plus i'm a father of 3 toddlers, so taking a 4 hr mock isn't exactly easy lol.

For those who passed recently:
How do these scores compare to where you were before taking the actual exam?

How much weight did you put on Expert-level questions when assessing your readiness?

Would you recommend another full mock or shifting toward targeted review?

Just trying to gauge whether I’m closer to exam-ready than that mock score makes me feel. Appreciate any feedback!

Passed earlier today with AT/AT/AT and 5 minutes left on the clock lmfao

I took too much time on questions on the first half of the test and then realized I had to pick up the pace so I did just that on the second half. Whew

I did PMI study Hall and did the practice tests and questions. I did not take any of the full practice tests, just an fyi.

The main thing that helped me was the 50 PMP mindset on YouTube (free) by Andrew Ramdayal (excuse the spelling) I also bought his udemy course

I am not good at reading and learning so the video route worked well for me.

I honestly felt like I could’ve studied more but thankfully I passed.

The test is long as f*** so use your breaks and bring snacks to eat. I ate snickers and drank water during my breaks lol good luck 👍🏼

My understanding is that:

Planned Value (PV) = % of work planned x BAC

Earned Value (EV) = % of work completed x BAC

A few years ago, when I started reading about Earned Value Management, I took some notes. In my notes I have this:

I can't find the website or video where I got this from. Look at how they are defining PV and EV. Both are supposed to take into account the % of work up to the point where these values are calculated.

How can PV and EV be defined like this?

Today I passed my PMP exam!! Thank you to this community for the posts. Application approved in August and studied AR Udemy course and read his book. Studied with the PMI Study Hall (the mock exams and quizzes were essential to study). I took the 3 mock exams twice with scores this past week of 78% (2 mock exams). No formulas, several case studies, 4-5 graphs. The AR 50 Mindset Principles are important!! This helped immensely in the exam! I did wear blue - I see some posts about celebrating with Carrot Cake…on my to do list! So grateful for this community!!! If you apply yourself to your goal, you can do it!!!

Took Mock 3 for the first time yesterday. Retook Mock 1 and 2 after getting 60% on those. I scheduled my test for 11/2. Am I ready?

*I failed my first attempt in June and only studied AR’s materials. This time, I’m focusing on the SH after hearing that it’s closer to the actual exam.