How to Practice for the PMP Exam

The Project Management Institute (PMI) states in its Certification Application/ Renewal Agreement that “…I agree not to discuss, debrief or disclose, in any manner, the specific content of PMI examination questions and answers, to any individual”. This is a royal pain for exam takers, as it prevents them from getting any idea of what a real-life PMP exam looks like before they actually sit for the real exam.

There are however plenty of resources available on the internet though, that claim to give practice questions that are “exactly similar” to the real test. Meh, I say, and so should you, if you know how the PMP exam questions are actually developed. What this means is that each individual rendering of the PMP exam is different, with a different difficulty level and a different passing parameter that’s decided by a panel of experts distributed across the world.

So how do we make the best use of the thousand and one PMP practice exams available via Google? Are the PMP exam questions and answers presented in these exams really as legit as they are made out to be?

The answer depends on whether you are looking for questions, exams that help you improve your knowledge level for the PMP exam, or are looking for an exact simulation of the PMP exam. If it is the latter you’re after, sorry, you’re out of luck. There’s simply no exact PMP exam simulation that’s available, primarily due to the fact mentioned in line 1 of this post.

however, you’re looking at improving your knowledge levels, the best approach is to adopt the shotgun tactic. Go through each and every PMP practice exam or PMP exam simulator you can find ( http://bfy.tw/6FyK), and aim at getting at least 80% of the questions correct in each test. This way you can feel secure knowing that your fundamentals are sound, which is what the PMP exam questions seek to measure. Do note, however, that it would be pointless to go for practice tests that do not give you PMP questions with answers.

The starting point to go for a PMP practice exam is the PMI website itself. Go to this page to first review the kind of questions the PMP exam would involve. After this, google is your playground!