Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we'll cover the structure of the exam which will help guide you in developing your own personal study plan and to take the mystery out of the exam and certification. To compliment your own plan, your also find a movie within this section dedicated to formulating a solid study plan to pass the exam on the first try. Because the exam is still fairly new at the time that this course was written, there exists a lot of confusion about what to study and what areas of project scheduling you should focus on. Let's see if we can clarify that for you. The exam itself consists of 170 multiple-choice questions. A hundred and fifty of those questions count towards your actual score. The other 20 are pre-test questions. This just means that the questions are in the validation phase and may potentially be used as a scored question in the future. The PMI first needs to measure how test takers score on them. While you're taking the exam, you won't know which are pre-test questions and therefore you should treat all questions as though they're scored. This is something that PMI does for every credential and is a common practice in general. When you fill out your application, you'll choose between two methods of taking the exam; either computer-based testing or paper-based testing. But the paper-based testing is offered under two special circumstances only. One, that you reside 186.5 miles or more away from the nearest computer-based testing center or two, your employer administers the exam for a minimum of ten employees. As of right now, Prometric is where you'll be taking your computer-based exam and you'll not be able to enroll for the exam until your application has been approved by PMI. Once you application is approved, you'll receive a link to schedule the exam. If you're curious about the location of the nearest Prometric testing center to your home or office, you can visit ProMetric.com. That's P-r-o-m-e-t-r-i-c.com. click on Enter where it says for Prometric Testing Solutions in the center of your screen and from there the easiest way is to just scroll all the way down the page and click on For Test Takers. If you're taking the computer-based test, you'll find out whether you passed or failed after you've completed the exam. In addition to an overall pass or fail, you will receive a score of proficient, moderately proficient or below proficient for each domain. I'll outline what these domains are in a moment. If you fail the exam, you may retake the exam two more times within your one-year eligibility period. If you fail all three times, you must wait one year from the last exam taken to reapply for the credential. The exam is three hours and thirty minutes long and an extra fifteen minutes is given prior to beginning the exam so that you may go through a tutorial that takes you through how to use the exam program. This is for those that are taking the computer-based test. The tutorial is nice and thorough. Something to note here is that as you're taking the actual exam, you'll be able to mark questions for review later. So if you aren't sure of the answer, you can come back to it at the end. This is really helpful in getting you through the difficult questions so you can move on to others and come back to the difficult ones later on. PMI gives you the exam blueprint so you know the percentage of questions that are included from the five exam domains and you have these exam domains right on your screen now. The first is schedule mission management. Nine percent of the questions focus on this domain. The rest of them are fairly equal, as in the percentage of questions. Schedule creation is 23 percent, schedule maintenance also 23 percent of the exam, schedule analysis is 22 percent and scheduling communication and reporting is 23 percent. At the end of the course we'll go through sample practice exam questions so that you become familiar with the exam format and structure. Practice exams really help you in working through small testing errors and also help you become accustomed to the style of the exam questions. I always recommend taking at least one full-length practice exam before taking your official exam. This will give you a better feel for the experience of taking such a long exam and whether you've set a good pace for finishing within the exam timeframe. In addition to this, you'll receive practice through workbook exercises which we'll review within designated sections throughout the course. By the way, all this information that was covered you can find within the PMI SP Handbook. The handbook is available for download from PMI's website. Right now you have a sample of PMI's website on your screen so keep in mind that this screen may actually change. Simply go to PMI.org, click on Career Development on the top menu. On the left-hand column menu, you'll see Certifications and Credentials and when you click on this, you'll see a submenu with several links about the credentials. So click on the link that says About PMI's Credentials and that'll lead you to an overview page that also contains links to all the credential handbooks. Keep in mind that PMI's website once again is continuously changing. And that concludes this movie on the overview of PMI Scheduling Professional Certification Exam. We'll go through a few additional details in the next movie.