PMI-ACP Exam Experience Sharing by Jacob Phan

Reading the exam experience sharing of other Aspirants is one of the most important tasks for anyone who would like to get PMI-ACP® certified. This is especially true as the PMI-ACP® Exam was updated on 15 July 2015 to the new exam syllabus and only real PMI-ACP® exam takers can let us know the impact of the changes. As can be confirmed by the experience of Jacob Phan, currently available PMI-ACP® Exam prep courses and books are enough to help aspirants to pass the new PMI-ACP® exam!

PMI-ACP® Exam Experience Sharing by Jacob Phan

Jacob Phan, PMI-ACP®, attempted the PMI-ACP® Exam on 3 Sep 2015 based on the new PMI-ACP® Exam syllabus. The results only came out on 28 Sep 2015 and he passed with 5M, 1P and 1B. Below is his PMI-ACP® Exam experience sharing:

Actually, I’m not a guy who works on management job but a programmer. In recent two years, I would like to improve myself to get a better job so that I started reading many books on this list.

I worked for many company in the past ten years but I only known Scrum by the Scrum Guide without any practice so I decided to study Agile in greater depth. Fortunately, my company approved to sponsor my PMI-ACP® exam fee.

First, on April 2015, I studied a course “PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®)” on Udemy to get the required 21 contact hours. The Udemy course supplied many good slides, video and review questions. I think they are good material but I only get the score 50-60 for their sample exams.

Then I read the book “PMI-ACP® Exam Prep” by Mike Griffith as suggestion from some guys on Linkedin. After reading that book twice, I one get the score of around 12/18 for the review question at the end of each chapter.

On July 2015, I thought I was ready for the exam but my wife advised me to take a look on Edward’s PMI-ACP® Exam blog. The sample exams suggested there changed my mind. I could not answer many situational theory questions there so I decided to read Mike Griffith’s book again twice and got the score 15/18 for the review questions. I do not have a good memory. I almost forgot all answers after one week so whenever I do the practice exam, the result is based on my knowledge — not from my memory.

At the end of August 2015, I think I could not learn anymore. It’s time to try the exam and I had even prepared the money to get the re-exam if I failed the first one.

On 3 September 2015, my D-Day, I was so surprised because there were all situation question on the exam, no mnemonics or concept questions. Most of the questions have 1 obvious incorrect answer, 2 good answers, and 1 best answer so I tried to exclude all incorrect answer and chose the best answer. There were around 3 questions about Kanban, no question about Crystal, Lean, DSDM, etc.

I finished the PMI-ACP® exam in 120 minutes and reviewed it in the remaining 60 minutes. However, I made correction to less than five question only.

I was too tired so that I decided to end the exam 10 minutes earlier. Unfortunately, I fell out the chair and lied on the floor so I was afraid that’s a bad omen. I thought to myself if I couldn’t pass the exam this time, I would read the PMI-ACP® Exam Prep book and try the exam again. I didn’t think there is any better exam prep materials.

Luckily, I got the result yesterday with 5M, 1P, 1B. [Since the PMI-ACP® exam has adopted a new syllabus in July 2015, candidates taking the exam before 15 Oct 2015 will need to wait some time before getting the results. Candidates taking the PMI-ACP® exam on or after 15 Oct 2015 will get their results immediately after submitting the exam.] That’s not a good result but I passed the exam by learning the book only without any practice. Do you think it’s not a bad achievement?

I hope my story could help other people.

Thanks Jacob for sharing his exam prep story to us!