Am extremely happy to say that I successfully passed my first Agile certification and got ABOVE TARGET at the first attempt. It took me about 2 months of self-study to fully prepare the exam while having to take care of my full-time developer job, not such easy but hard work is always worth.

Here I’m glad to share my exam experiences and tips, hope these can help the fellow PMI-ACP aspirants.

Costs:

I get certified with around GBP£510, including all the courses and study materials. Here’s how I spent my money:

1. Exam fee + PMI member fee – USD$574 (In GBP its around £435)
2. Udemy Course – £9.99 (with cash back its £9)
3. 2 Reference books – total £63.99 from Amazon

Used study Materials:

1. Udemy course: << PMI-ACP Exam Prep for PMBOK 6 >> by Joseph Phillips
2. Book: << The PMI-ACP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try >> Iteration 3 by Andy Crowe
3. Book: << PMI-ACP Exam Prep >> 2nd Edition by Mike Griffiths
4. Some online free exercises & Mock tests (will list below)

Mock test results:

Free online exercises (No registration required)

• Mike Griffiths 20 Questions (2012 & 2015) 90% + 95%
• iZenbridge 60 Questions 78%
• PMI-ACP® Training 80 Questions 85%
• Agileexams.com 25 Questions 90%

Practices from paid books

• PMI-ACP® Exam Prep by Mike Griffiths (140 questions) 93%
• PMI-ACP® Exam: How to Pass On Your First Try by Andy Crowe (100 questions * 2) 96％ + 98%

My Study Plan:

1. Calculate the amount of time you can spend on studying: as I still need to work during the day time, only nights work for me from Mon to Fri, i.e. 3 hours at most per weekdays. On weekends I can focus more and spend at most 8 hours per day. Therefore, I spent 20 to 30 hours per week and kept this schedule for around 2 months.
2. Determine how long you should focus on each domain: There are 7 domains in PMI-ACP syllabus and ratios of each part inside the examination are different. Prioritising the domains and planning how long you should study on each one.
3. I took around 10 – 15 hours per domain in the first round — reading and watching all materials to gain a rough understanding of each domain. Afterwards, I spent nearly 1 month for mock tests and deeply review all unclear topics in final.

Week	Things to do
1-2	Read <<PMI-ACP® Exam Prep>>, skip the exercise first
3	Read <<How to Pass On Your First Try>>, skip the exercise first
4	Take the online free practice questions, mark down the wrong as notes
5-6	Read my materials again and again, search some more articles to deepen understanding and read experiences shared by other experienced people. (I read each thing 3 times at least)
7-8	Take the book exercises as final review. Ready to go.

Preparation and Examination Tips:

1. Better to prepare when your full time job is not in a busy season.
2. Myself prefer a new paperback rather than any second hand or e-book, it’s easier for me to read and find the related sections, hence bring better absorb and focus.
3. Drop down your own notes and make them tidy, it can always strengthen your memories.
4. No rote learning, don’t cram for the exam. Try not to remember any answer of mock papers — questions are seldom repeat — but to understand the actual meanings behind that.
5. Read the books, materials, answer explanations and your own notes as many times as you can util you are able to apply agile principles confidently and get the real point. Hard working is the best thing and you will never regret after you convert your short-term memories into long-term ones.
6. Don’t rely on your personal working experiences only. Your organisation may use tailored methods to meet its own needs. Read and masticate the materials, embrace the basic values of agile is essential and important.
7. Beware some practice questions ain’t good as they will never show in the real exam, e.g. the publish year or publishers of Agile manifesto. They may some good extra knowledge for Agile but not the exam. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t know the true answer of that kind of questions. Anyway you should have a clear mindset to determine whether a question is good or bad, never let the bad ones make you down or confuse.
8. Read each question and all answers carefully during examination, don’t stop util you finish reading the last punctuation. The exam time is sufficient for everyone to complete all questions (even English is not your first language, so do I!) if you have manage your time well. Don’t stick in one question if that is difficult, move to another one first and come back later. I spent 140 minutes for 120 questions and the last 40 minutes for a fully review.

This exam is not a very simple task but it’s not that hard if you have ample preparation. I wish to share more in the coming weeks, thanks for reading here and Good luck!