-
8 Traits of Top Project Managers - Part 1
February 9, 2012
-
Agile Project Management - Engaging Your Customer!
February 9, 2012
-
9 Tips to Avoid Traps in Project Planning
February 9, 2012
-
Why Projects Succeed - Executive Sponsorship
February 8, 2012
-
On Customer Participation in Agile Projects
February 8, 2012
-
A Project Charter for Lazy Teams
February 8, 2012
-
The Power of Process: How Bad Project Management Kills Great Ideas
February 7, 2012
-
The Benefits of Virtual Project Management
February 7, 2012
-
Lessons Learned and the Project Council
February 7, 2012
-
Project Management Across the Knowledge Domain
February 6, 2012
How Is the PMP Exam Organized?
August 1, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Certification, PMP
How Is the PMP Exam Organized?
By Bogdan Gorka
PMI and your practice
First of all it is worth remembering during the entire exam preparation period that the PMP exam is based on practice. It means that most of the questions will be based on situations and your task in choosing the right answer is to know which behavior is suggested by the PMI to be followed. However, you should not base your answers only on your real-projects experience. It is of course valuable but you might have gained some approach which is deemed by the PMI as inappropriate. Studying for the exam will help you to see your current practices in a different light and that is one of many benefits this exam offers. At the same time you should not forget, that the exam situations are described with terms and processes taken from the PMBOK Guide (pronounced as the ‘pimbock’). Therefore there will not be many questions testing how you memorised definitions but rather how you can use these terms and processes in real situations.
PMP exam structure
The PMP exam is based on answering 200 question. These questions consist of four possible answers out of which only one is correct. You have 4 hours altogether to complete the exam which gives you slightly over 1 minute for each question. What is interesting is that 25 questions are not marked at all because they are released for testing purposes only. The database of exam questions is constantly changing and new questions have to be tested before they are allowed into the official pool of questions. This means that answers to only 175 questions are actually influencing the final score. The bad news is that you do not know which questions are these ‘testing questions’.
Passing level
If you reply correctly to only 106 questions which is 61% you pass the exam. So, as you can see, you have to answer correctly to a little bit more than 50% of all questions but still, it is a big challenging.
It is also worth mentioning that no question should be left unanswered. There is no negative points for wrong answers so it is always a good thing to answer even the questions which seem to be quite unfamiliar. There is a 25% chance that you hit correctly!
Project domains that are tested
The framework of the exam stems directly from the PMBOK Guide. This means that there is a certain number of questions for each project management process group. The PMP exam handbook states in percent how many questions you should expect in each group:
- Initiation, 11%
- Planning, 23%
- Executing, 27%
- Monitoring and Control 21%
- Closing, 9%
- Professional and Social Responsibility, 9%
If you take the percentage of questions from each domain, which is stated in the PMP exam handbook, you can roughly calculate how many questions there will be.
- Initiation, 22 questions
- Planning, 46 questions
- Executing, 54 questions
- Monitoring and Control 42 questions
- Closing, 18 questions
- Professional and Social Responsibility, 18 questions
I would assume that in each of these groups there will be a few pre-test questions that will not be counted for the final results. Again, there are 25 of them.
Bogdan Gorka is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with more than 10 years of practical experience gained in the FMCG industry. Bogdan shares his IT project management experience in the blog: PMAdept.net
No comments yet.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
- Agile Project Management
- Ask the Hut
- Certification
- Change Management
- Communications Management
- Computer Based Information Systems
- Concepts
- Corporate Transformation
- Cost Management
- Critical Chain Project Management
- Delegation
- History
- HR Management
- Implementing Project Management
- Integration Management
- Lessons Learned
- Management
- Miscellaneous
- People Issues
- PMBOK
- PRINCE2
- Procurement Management
- Program Management
- Project Lifecycle Phases
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management Advantages
- Project Management as a Career
- Project Management Best Practices
- Project Management Charts
- Project Management Definitions
- Project Management Ethics
- Project Management for Beginners
- Project Management Guides
- Project Management Musings
- Project Management Office
- Project Management Proposals
- Project Management Templates
- Project Portfolio Management
- Project Workforce Management
- Quality Management
- Requirements Management
- Risk Management
- Scheduling
- Scope Management
- SCRUM
- Soft Management
- Time Management
- Training
- Uncategorized