Passed PjM - No secret code, just time.

I passed Project Management this weekend, and there isn't a secret sauce to studying for this one...just time.

My study materials:
-Black Spectacles

-AHPP

-Professional Practice: A Guide to Turning Design into Buildings

-PPI ARE 5.0 (The flashcards are useless for this exam, IMO)

-NCARB practice exams

Watch all the BlkS videos and take all the practice exams and quizzes. Read all the relevant chapters in AHPP (the most helpful for this exam, IMO) and take the NCARB practice exam (2nd most helpful, IMO).

All of this took me more than 2months to absorb, but once I got to the exam, none of the questions were as complex as you'll find on BlkS, PPI, or the NCARB practice exam. That allowed me to quickly understand what each question was talking about and answer with 80% confidence.

Lastly, my exam practice and day-of strategy were the same: Mark ALL questions requiring math or review of a schedule as REVIEW and keep things pushing along until the end. This included the scenarios. Once going through all the questions, I went back to the math/schedule questions...of which there were about 15 (1st disclaimer: under no circumstance should you expect this number of math/schedule questions. It's just the number I received on that day at that time). This left me over an hour to walk back through them, take my time and answer them.

2nd Disclaimer: I do not recommend this strategy without being very comfortable with the subject matter. I hate the math questions on the AREs and can go on for many minutes walking through why but for this particular exam, I practiced a strategy that worked for me on exam day. Maybe I got lucky.

Good luck, friends.

Taylor Evans August 30, 2023 22:56

Hey Darryl,

I just took the PjM exam, and felt very confident but the math questions may have gotten me, do you recommend any resources for practicing these tricky ones?

Darryl Jackson August 30, 2023 23:32

Afternoon Taylor,

Sorry, I do not have a list of resources for the math. If I remember correctly, the Proj Management exam dealt with project budgets, schedules, hourly rates, revenue, etc. Since the only resources I used were AHPP, PPI, and Black Spectacles, I simply took the examples they provided and changed the numbers and the scenarios a bit to get to the answers in different ways...just like algebraic combinations we learned in grade school.

This basically helped me recognize different ways the math questions could be asked so I wouldn't waste time just trying to figure out what the heck they were looking for.

Hope that helped.

Passed PjM - No secret code, just time.

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