My Experience with PMP

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share my experience with preparing for and taking the PMP exam.

I started with Andrew’s PMP course on Udemy, which I found quite helpful. But once I began reading his book, I realized it was much more helpful ☺️. I’d absolutely recommend focusing more on the book than the online course. I think I went through the book 5–8 times until I had everything memorized. I also answered all the questions in the book—not because they prepare you directly for the PMP exam, but because they help you check whether you’ve properly memorized the chapter content.

When I started using PMI Study Hall and took my first mini test, I ran into a big issue: I was either wrong or unsure about almost every question. That’s when I realized I had memorized everything but hadn’t developed the right mindset. So I turned to Andrew’s video on the 200 PMI questions. I watched about 50 of them, and they gave me a lot of insight into how to approach the questions—especially how to eliminate options effectively. Then I went back to Study Hall and treated it as a learning tool rather than an evaluation. I didn’t take any full exams at that point because I wanted to save them for later. I strongly recommend using Copilot to help interpret the questions and answers—especially early on, when the explanations in Study Hall can be a bit hard to digest.

After completing all the mini exams and reviewing them, I moved on to the full exams; you can see my scores in another post I made here. On exam days, I woke up at 8 a.m., started at 9 a.m., and tackled the questions in three sections with two 10-minute breaks. I even paid attention to what I ate and drank during the exam. I took the full exams with one or two days break in between.

What helped me most on exam day was keeping things simple. Don’t overthink the questions—just read and go with the first answer that comes to mind. Yes, you might get some wrong, but it’s better than diving too deep and second-guessing everything, in my opinion. If you overanalyze, every option can start to look correct.

I also recommend taking the exam at a test center. I live in the Netherlands and took mine at BCN in Utrecht—the staff were super friendly. Just a heads-up:

You don’t have to submit the first 60 questions exactly at the 70-minute mark.
You can take breaks during the sessions to eat, drink, or whatever—but it counts against your exam time.

In the end, I had about 30 minutes left, which I didn’t use. I didn’t review any of my answers.

Take it easy. It is all about the mindset. Try to also enjoy it when you study.

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