Preparing for PMI ACP Exam

In the last week of April 2020, I appeared for the PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI) exam and cleared it.

While I started serious preparations around 6 weeks before i.e. in March 2020, I think it requires 8 to 10 weeks of preparation. 

It all started with classroom training in July 2019. However, post that I didn’t get time to do much preparation due to my busy schedule.

Initially, I had taken up Joseph Philip’s ‘PMI-ACP Exam Prep for PMBOK6’ course on Udemy. It gives a good overview of ACP. There are short tests at the end of each chapter which you can take at your convenience and can even pause it in between. There are also two full mock tests at the end of the course. This test really gives you an idea about how much you have understood and how you will fare in the exams. Ideally, after 2-3 attempts, you should get 80-90% correct answers.

In parallel, I was also reading Mike Griffiths ‘PMI-ACP Exam Prep’ book – Second edition. You need to read this book twice. There are practice questions and answers at the end of each chapter, which gives you a good idea about the kind of question that will appear in the exam. In the first read, you will get around 60% correct answers. However, in your second read, you should get 80-90% correct answers for the exercises given at the end of the chapter. There are two practice tests on this books’ publishers’ web-site - https://rmcls.com/extras. Two mini-tests of 60 questions each help you to prepare for final exams. Ideally, I suggest you should take this a week or two weeks before you have scheduled your exam.

There is also the PMI-ACP workbook by Mike Griffiths which is also quite helpful. This contains 50 chapters for domain subjects in a summarized form with few questions at the end of it. This can also be a good reference in the last two weeks. Both these books authored by Mike are written in a very lucid style and one should have no issues completing them over a weekend.

As I understand from friends, the test simulator on the same publisher’s website i.e. https://rmcls.com/pmi-acp is also good. One can subscribe for mock tests a couple of weeks before appearing for the final exams. However, to be honest I didn’t take the same.

I had also borrowed a couple of books from the PMI library for preparation.

The first one was Headfirst Agile from the O'Reilly publication. It has a very different style of teaching. There are a couple of mock tests (difficult ones) at the end of it which also helps you.

And the second book is the PMI ACP exam prep book by Andy Crowe. Again, it has a totally different style of teaching. This book also contains two mock tests which helped for final exam preparation.

On the last day, I also took some free mock tests on izendesk website which I found very useful. These mock tests can be used in the last 2 weeks to gain confidence. It is my recommendation that one should have scored 80% up before taking the final exams.

I had taken the proctored based exam. Since I was taking it for the first time, I was a bit tense. However, after a while, I got settled. Please ensure you log in at least 30 minutes before your scheduled time and you have good internet speed.

Initially, the first half of the exam was very tough for me. The second part was comparatively easy.

Hope this helps you in your preparation for the PMI-ACP exam.

Good luck to all aspirants reading this article. Please post a comment or PM if you need further information. I am also ready to take a session for you if you have any doubts on a need basis.

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