PASSED AT/AT/AT 🎉🎉🎉 Preparation, Mindset, Tips & Tricks

A massive thank you to this wonderful group for all the shared experiences, advice, and motivation.

This community helped me a lot during my preparation, so now it is my turn to give back.

This is my personal experience and feedback based on what worked for me. Everyone has a different learning style, so take what is useful and adapt it to your own preparation.

Short Feedback:

The PMP exam does not only test what you know. It tests how you behave, how you think, and how you make decisions under pressure.

To pass, you need all of these together:

Knowledge + Mindset + Study Hall Practice + Exam Time Management

The exam is hard. Take it seriously. In my opinion, it is better to be overprepared than to fail because you underestimated it.

Detailed Feedback:

1-Preparation Resources:

• AR’s Udemy Course: Used it for my 35 contact hours. It was a good way to get used to the PMP content. I watched it at 1.5x speed.
• Third3Rock’s Study Notes: These were my main reference notes. I used them during Study Hall practice and especially during the last 3 days before the exam.
• Ricardo Vargas PMP Process Flow: A smooth and simple way to understand how all the processes connect together.
• Mohammed Rahman’s 23 PMP Mindset Principles: Very useful and key for mindset preparation.
• AR 200 Ultra Hard PMP Questions: I completed around half of them. They were good to understand how to apply the mindset, but in my opinion, they are easier than the real exam and do not fully represent the exam difficulty.
• David McLachlan 200 Agile Questions: Very good for building Agile understanding and knowledge.
• David McLachlan 100 Waterfall PMP Questions: Good for understanding the predictive approach.
• DM 110 Drag-and-Drop Questions: I did these during the last 3 days as a memory refresh.

2-Mindset Resources

• This was a fantastic mindset summary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pmp/comments/1r7kkjv/comprehensive_guidance_for_eliminating_answers/

This is a great summary of mindset + Study Hall scenarios: Special thanks to u/ashleyfitzy

• Another key mindset post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pmp/comments/1l0x4i6/i_passed_the_pmp_you_can_too_key_mindset_for_the/

3-Study Hall

I used both Study Hall Essential and Plus, but I focused more on Essential.

-Study Hall Essential:

• Practice Questions: 717 questions — 78%
• Mock Exam 1: 75%
• Mock Exam 2: 78%

-Study Hall Plus:

• Mock Exam 3: 80%
• Mock Exam 4: 78%
• Mock Exam 5: 79%

-From day 1 of Study Hall practice and mock exams, I decided not to review Expert questions.

-My focus was only on non-Expert wrong answers.

-For every wrong non-Expert question, I reviewed:

• Why did I get it wrong?
• Was it a knowledge gap?
• Was it a mindset violation?
• Did I misread the question?
• Did I rush?
• Did I miss one important keyword?

-Build an error log. This helped me a lot.

-In my opinion, Study Hall questions are the closest to the real exam.

-The real exam questions were shorter, but the answer choices were often vague, and it was sometimes harder to decide between the final two options.

4-How I Used AI

I used both ChatGPT and Claude during my preparation, mainly to support my review process and turn mistakes into lessons learned.

I used them to:

• Clarify PMP concepts when I was confused
• Analyze wrong answers from Study Hall
• Identify whether my mistake was a knowledge gap, mindset issue, misreading, or time-pressure mistake
• Build a personal cheat sheet from my recurring mistakes and lessons learned
• Create quick summaries and reminders for final review

-Important point: when reviewing Study Hall wrong answers, I always provided the correct answer and the official Study Hall explanation. I did not rely on AI to guess the answer by itself.

-For me, AI was not a replacement for Study Hall or PMP materials. It was a review assistant that helped me structure my learning and understand my mistakes better.

5-Exam Day

• I wore blue: AR recommendation 😂
• I arrived around 45 minutes early at the test center.
• The check-in process was smooth, and the setup was comfortable.
• I used the highlight feature a lot. I highlighted keywords, constraints, and important wording in almost every question.

Question Breakdown

• First set: Moderate/Difficult with some Expert-level questions.
• Second set: WTH? Difficult/Expert. Very tough. I consumed around 75 minutes and had no time to review any questions.
• Third set: Easier than the second set. Mostly Easy/Moderate/Difficult with some Expert-level questions.

Question Format

All questions were situational. No surprise there.

I had approximately:

• 8–10 drag-and-drop questions: easy, basic knowledge
• 5–6 graph/chart questions : some needed time to understand and analyze
• Zero calculations
• Some SPI/CPI interpretation questions

Time Management

• Time management is critical.
• The second set was very tough and consumed much more time than expected.
• Do not panic if one section feels brutal. Keep going. The next section may be easier.
• Stay calm, manage your breaks, and protect your focus until the end.

6-Post-Exam

PASS! All Above Target! 🎉🎉🎉

I got myself an ice cream and listened to 50 Cent — P(I)MP 😄

A BIG THANK YOU to everyone here for being part of this journey! ❤️

Feel free to ask me anything. I am happy to help.

YOU GOT THIS!