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Passed PSM1 today

Last post 08:24 pm April 18, 2018 by Daniel Jorissen
3 replies
03:50 pm October 28, 2015

Just wanted to share my journey to PSM1

I have been working with Scrum, Kanban Agile, Lean and coaching teams for the past 6 or so years, I have spent about 2 years as a Scrum Master during this time when the team thought it was most appropriate.

For the last week I have been testing mock tests with Test Taker, and the Open tests on Scrum.org.

Test Taker - Originally I was getting 60% this has risen to 80%, but I gave up with this site. It didn't think I was ready for PSM1 and some of the questions/answers were dubious. The site has helped me by getting me to really know the scrum guide but I don't think the questions helped.

Open Assessments - I originally was getting about 70%; I now always get 100% on the Scrum Master Open Assessment. I also did the PO and Developer Open Assessments which I was getting 90% and 80% respectively.

I passed with 95% overall:
Scrum Framework 97.5%
Theories and Principles 90%
Cross Functional, Self Organising 92.9%
Coaching and Facilitation 100%

The main assessment was much harder than the open assessments, I think my experience over the years helped me get a higher score, rather than doing Test Taker. Test Taker did make me more focused on learning the scrum guide.

If you really know the scrum guide, and have been coaching people in agility you should pass. I can see how PSM1 is a shock for some people.

My recommendation, know the scrum guide, get 100% in Open Assessments go for it and see what score you get. Inspect and Adapt as needed


09:22 am October 30, 2015

Congrats John, and thanks for your feedback.

Based on many of the other posts in this forum, most of the 3rd party test sites are really bad as they ask totally bogus questions that reflect a complete misunderstanding of Scrum. They tend to lead people astray.

Having said that, there are some suspicious threads on this forum where people claim to be giving test studying advice but almost always throw in a reference to one of the 3rd party test prep sites that is positive. It's almost as if they are offering some financial (or otherwise) incentive for their customers to post those reviews. Seem very suspect to me.

I'm not against 3rd party prep sites per se, but I am against them spreading bad education/misinformation about Scrum.


04:55 am April 15, 2018

Hi John. Looks like your are very good in coaching and facilitation section. How do you prepare yourself for it?


11:06 pm April 17, 2018

I spent about a year on a scrum team as a "content specialist" helping a new PO who had no experience with the product. My primary role with the company was manager of the product's content and support group for which I handled escalated user support cases, reported system issues to the appropriate people/departments until they were resolved, and also contributed my "user's perspective" as items for the product backlog. I was uniquely qualified as a "content specialist" because I had spent 8 years communicating with the product's users and was intimately familiar with every aspect of the system. I developed for myself a solid technical background working with databases, splunk, JIRA, graphics design, UX design, writing epics and user stories -- I didn't write code but was involved with pretty much everything else.

So when I decided to earn the Scrum.org PSM 1 certification and become a Scrum Master, I found plenty of online documentation and discussion forums supporting the Scrum Guide at Scrum.org and the Scrum Alliance, but before I dug into those I knew I first needed to start with a high-level overview of the scrum framework and agile practices.

I found a couple of video courses at udemy.com by Paul Pashun that really helped give me that foundation -- I took the PSM 1 exam last week and passed on my first try.


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