Things to take care of at PSM 1 assessment

Hello,
I passed the PSM 1 assessment last Sunday with 96.3%. The experiences shared by people on this forum played a major role in my achievement. I have been regularly visiting this site for last couple of months. That's when I thought of taking the PSM 1 assessment. The experiences shared on this forum are related to the pattern of question. Those are very helpful. After taking the assessment, I feel, one thing that would have helped me was knowing the things to take care of at the time of taking the assessment. No body have talked about this or at least I did not come across any discussion like that. So I thought of sharing my experience. It will be helpful especially for slow internet connections.

Here it is:

1. Ideally the time to answer 80 questions is 60 min. But realistically you have only 45 minutes. Here is why - Each question takes 8 to 15 seconds to load after clicking 'submit-forward' button. In my case few questions took 20 seconds. Assuming average load time as 12 seconds, it would take 12*80 = 960 seconds i.e. 16 minutes. Please note that I was using a broadband connection (4 MBPS).

2. Do NOT rely much on book marking the question to review later. If you don't know the answer and want to book mark it to review later then do so by selecting the best choice. Don't leave any question unanswered even if you don’t know the answer. If you leave it unanswered to answer it later and somehow if you don’t get time to answer it then it will be treated as incorrect.

3. Keep a pen and notepad to note down the book marked question numbers. There are two benefits.
First, the website takes time in loading the tick mark symbol (which indicates the book mark) against each question. In my case it took around 10 seconds to load the book mark indicator after loading the questions link. So if you have question numbers you would be able to save this 10 second for every book marked question. Also, every time you open a question using book marked question link, you need to go to book mark list again and then only you would be able to go to the next book marked question.
Second benefit of noting the questions to be reviewed on note book is that it will help in remembering level of review required. Say for example you are 80% sure about question number 10 but still want to review if time permits, put a single tick mark against it, and you are 50% sure about question number 15, put two tick marks against it. This will ensure that questions with two tick marks will get higher priority at the time of review. Something like creating a priority list for review.

4. Don't panic if you take proportionally more time for initial few questions. I remember answering only 20 questions in first 18 minutes. To me it seems like in the beginning I was a bit too careful and read every question slowly, may be word by word, in a bid to not miss any key word but once I felt question were mostly familiar, I gained confidence and picked up pace. And I was able to answer all questions in 52 minutes.

One more thing I would like to share is that I had gone through the Mikhail Lapshin’s quiz. Questions are great but unfortunately I got the wrong impression that the actual assessment will also be same manner regarding display of questions and it will be easy to navigate from one book marked question to another. It was not. The actual assessment shows the questions list in a separate page and to go from one question to another you will always have to come back to the questions list page.

So As an assessment taker I want to draw Scrum.org’s attention to making the navigation easy so that people with low speed connection don’t get discriminated.

Ian Mitchell’s posts provided a good understanding of the Scrum. Thank You.
I will share my experience regarding the type of questions some other time.

Thanks,
Pratosh