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What is the PMP Exam Passing Score?

January 21, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Certification, PMP

What is the PMP Exam Passing Score?
By Cornelius Fichtner, PMP

The PMP® exam is a 4-hour multiple choice exam. In these 4 hours, you are going to have to answer 200 questions. Each question is either scenario based or knowledge based and has 4 possible answers - A, B, C or D. You can only select one answer.

Out of these 200 questions, 25 are considered “pretest questions”. These pretest questions do not affect your score. The PMI uses them as an effective and legitimate way for testing the questions. In other words: new questions for the exam are first tried out in this way, to see how well they work. The pretest questions are randomly placed throughout the exam.

So you start out with 200 questions minus the 25 pretest questions which leaves 175 questions. Out of these, you must answer 106 correctly. That is 61%.

If you would like more details on this, then I recommend that you read the PMP Credentials Handbook which you can find at this location: http://www.pmi.org/PDF/PDC_PMPHandbook.pdf.

Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is the host of The Project Management Podcast™ at www.thepmpodcast.com and The Project Management PrepCast™, the first true PMP® Podcast at www.pmprepcast.com. Cornelius worked as a Project Manager in his native Switzerland, in Germany and in the USA for the last 17 years. He received his PMP credential in April 2004. He has led projects for a management consulting company, a national retailer and an internet startup company. Currently, Cornelius works as a project manager for one of the oldest financial service providers in the USA. His passions are project management methodologies, PMOs and helping others pass the PMP Exam. In addition to hosting the PrepCast™, he is an instructor for the PMP Workshop and the 2007 Chair of his local PMI chapter. He currently lives in Silverado, California, USA with his wife and their two computers.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 and is filed under Certification, PMP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 people have left comments

I saw that in 2005 the passing score was 106 out of 175, or 61%. Is that still true??
Thanks

M wrote on September 2, 2008 - 9:18 am | Visit Link

M,

Yes, it still holds true (I check regularly), the PMP Passing Score is still 61%.

PM Hut wrote on February 19, 2009 - 11:34 am | Visit Link

The Handbook on PMP does not specify the pass percentage. Then how are you arriving at 61%.

Sri wrote on June 18, 2009 - 3:52 pm | Visit Link

Sri,

If you calculate the number of questions that you need to answer correctly out of the 200, you’ll see that it’s 61%.

PM Hut wrote on June 18, 2009 - 4:09 pm | Visit Link

The handbook does not mention how many questions need to be answered correctly, it only states that 25 of the 200 questions are pre-test and not counted. So you’re right in that 175 questions are graded, however, where did you get the 61%?

syed wrote on December 27, 2009 - 11:36 pm | Visit Link

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