Customer Reviews

PMP Final Exam Review

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I wish I had read the reviews here before I bought this book and exam CD. I had studied with the Crosswind series of materials by Tony Johnson, including his simulation exam CD, and the Rita book. I wanted to validate with another exam simulation source that I really knew the material versus memorizing the answers. I thought this was a good value - 4 exams for $30.00. I found the questions long and extremely wordy and confusing. It blew my confidence. Thankfully another person in my study group assured me that the test questions were formatted similar to the questions on the Crosswinds exam CD. I discarded this CD and concentrated on the materials I had from Crosswind. The exam answers refer you back to the Sybex book for clarification. The Crosswind exam provides clear information on the answers and refers you to the page in the PMBOK if necessary. The Crosswind exam CD recaps by knowledge area what you need to concentrate on and you can retest by a specific area.

The questions in this book were insanely difficult. Utilizing this book is likely to depress you into not taking the PMP exam when you are more than prepared for it. I was unable to score above a 50% on any test in this book, but score an 82% on the test. I believe this proves the book is of little value or use, it's not testing you on the content of the exam.

The questions in this book are insanely difficult. If you can even get a passing mark on these sample exams you'll do just fine on the PMP exam. In my own case, I scored about 15 points higher on the actual PMI exam versus the 4 sample exams in this book.

If you have unfortunately purchased the book my recommendation is to focus on understanding why you got questions wrong, and for questions that you are unsure of but still guess correctly thoroughly understanding why the answer was correct.

I bought this along with about everything else available for the PMP. The biggest problem I had with the book was the test. They were invalid, too difficult. I finaly took the advice of my PMP frineds, focused on Rita's Books and Practice test and passes very easily. One reason I decided to go back and comment here was that before I took the PMP I let this lady's practice test blow my confidence. Again, too hard. If searching for PMP material, stay w/RMC. . .

This material is not accurate and poorly structured. Don't waste your time, unless you have a lot of it to spend on figuring out what the questions were aimed for--I've used better tools out there than this one.

The biggest flaw with this material is that the many answers provided do not match up with the PMBOK guide which is supposed to be the deciding authority for the PMP exam. The questions though obtuse and wordy do not provide the practice they should for the PMP exam because they use different terminology than the PMBOK which can be very misleading. A case in point being the input/output/tools questions which are mostly wrong when you try to match up the answers with the PMBOK.

I've found three questions in the first exam alone where the answers must be inaccurate - in one case the comment explaining the answer is clearly refering to another question, or an earlier version of the question.

In general the comments explaining the answers are very short and not very rich in content, so not so useful as a study tool.

The user interface to the on line tests sometimes requires scolling to read the full text of a question, very distracting. And it does not let you take tests by knowledge areas.

I was amazed when I read the reviews that this book is not good. I used this book and found it very useful, has a lot of situational questions, which really show your weaknesses and make you read the PMBOK more and understand it more. Some questions have very close answers which stimulate your thinking, and make you focus more on inputs, tools and tech., and outputs and make you understand the processes interaction more.

I agree that the questions are long and difficult, but this is something good and the PMP candidate should be used to such type of questions. I agree also that I found answers for some questions that might be incorrect, but this may be one question per exam, so it's no big deal.

I used this book with PMP: Project Management Professional Study Guide, 2nd Edition for Kim Heldman, and with Exam Prep for Rita Mulcahy, and those three books with the PMBOK were all great and complement each other. Each author has his own style of questions, and what I can say that this book (PMP final exam review) is a very good book, and it really benefited me a lot. Thanks for the author, he made a great job.