PSMII experience report.

Wanted to share my PSMII test experience. What I have learned:
1) You need to be able to type at a minimum of about 40 words per minute to complete all the answers on the test
2) The test’s user experience is TERRIBLE – and what to expect.
3) Many of the questions come directly from the Scrum Guide and Software in 30 Days.
4) There are Nexus/Enterprise questions on the exam, didn’t see that coming.

40 words per minute:

There are about 10 multiple choice and 24 short answer questions on the tests. Let’s say it takes you 45 seconds per multiple choice question, and 30 seconds to read and understand the short answer questions, and a minute of think time for each short answer question. That leaves 76 minutes for 24 questions, or about 3 minutes per question.
Most questions are multi-part questions. There are 1-4 parts to each question, but let’s say the average is 2.5 parts per question. You need to address each part or marks are deducted, and lets say it takes on average 2.5 sentences to address each part. So that gives about 6.25 sentences per question to do on average.
The average sentence length is about 100 characters, so about 625 characters. At 5 characters per word, that’s 125 words in ~3 minutes or ~40 words per minute (or 39.47 wpm if we keep the decimals throughout).

Conclusion: To have time to answer the all the questions you need to be able to type at a minimum of about 40 words per minute.

Another way to look at this is to see how many sentences you get depending on your typing speed. If you are a slower typist maybe you need to answer each part of the question in only one sentence. (<-- that sentence is exactly 100 characters as an example.)

Analysis: To qualify as a PSMII you are required to type at 40 words per minute. Even if you know the material pretty well, you had better be able to formulate your answers extremely quickly and express it in an extremely concise form. I have heard from some people who took this test a long time ago that you should be able to answer these questions in a sentence or two, but that is not my experience. I suspect that over time the questions have gotten harder, with more parts, but there hasn’t been an adjustment to the number of questions, or the time given to take the test – or maybe I just got a bunch of harder questions)

Advice: When you take the PSM II, go through the entire test answering each part with one brief sentence, of whatever comes to mind immediately. Then go through the exam again, this time to expand your answers wherever the brief answer needs more detail.
If you are a really slow typist like me, you really have to have answers written out before you take the exam. I had about 80 answers prepared going into the test, unfortunately I guessed poorly at the questions that would be asked so they were not much use. Have a look at the “Origin of Questions” section below for some hints on how to get better prewritten answers.



The TERRIBLE user experience:

For me, the user experience is terrible. I like reading all questions before starting. The UX makes you type something in each answer before you can go to the next question, and it fails silently when it does, just showing the same question again with no indication that you need to put in an answer before going on. Even worse, it was my experience that the “next” button would not active for a few seconds even after entering a few random characters. Very frustrating, and it cost me a couple of minutes to figure out it was the completely awful test application that was the problem. There are no bookmarks like in the PSMI tests, so make sure you have something to write down the questions you want to review. (not that you will have time for that) The PSMII questions have different worth, but there is no indication what that worth is. You will have to guess at the question that might be worth more and hope you don’t spend a lot of time on a question that is not worth much.



Origin of questions:

Most of the question I encountered come directly from the Scrum Guide, or Software in 30 Days. Often in pretty twisted and obscure ways.
I recommend you study the scrum guide focusing on answering questions based on the generalities.
For instance this sentence “Decisions to optimize value and control risk are made based on the perceived state of the artifacts. To the extent that transparency is complete, these decisions have a sound basis.”
Be prepared to answer questions such as:
What is value and how is it measured?
What are means to control risk?
How is transparency made complete for each of the artifacts? (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment)
How is transparency perceived in artifacts?
What steps should you as a Scrum Master take when transparency is not complete?
What should you do if risks of the project are not being addressed?
How is value optimized?
Why is transparency important?
What are the consequences of not having complete transparency?

This captures what seems to be the method used to make up the questions.
It looks like the PSMI kind of focuses on what is actually in the scrum guide, while the PSMII focuses on all that is inferred from the scrum guide.

I would also study chapter 4-9 of Software in 30 days by having knowledge of each section. It is pretty clear there are question taken directly from certain paragraphs of the book. You should be able to reverse engineer answers from these.



There are questions about enterprise scrum:

Be sure to include the nexus guide in your studies. You really want to review the scaling presentations done by Schwaber as well. I haven’t read the Enterprise architecture book mentioned in the study guide, so consider that as a source as well.


That’s it.
Hopefully this will guide your studies a little bit as well as your approach to taking the exam. It is a bit artificially hard, but studying for it will really increase your knowledge of Scrum. I’ve learned a lot.

Good luck on the PSMII.