Passed PSM1 on Feb 02, 2017 in First Attempt
Dear All
I am glad to inform you that I have achieved my PSM1 on Feb 02, 2017 in first attempt with 96.3%. I would like to share my journey to PSM1 for the aspirants. Hope you can be benefited from this:
1. First of all, it was a journey of 4 months as I was tied to my professional commitments. PSM1 is all about the OFFICIAL SCRUM GUIDE. Mark my words, OFFICIAL Scrum guide. There are a lot of material available all around the internet, but those provide you a muddy version of Scrum which is modified scrum which as per the experience of a particular person, but that's not the right way. We have to strict ourselves to official scrum guide available on "scrum.org".
2. I have no experience of Scrum in my profession, so if I can do it, anybody can do it. So Chill, there is no rocket science.
3. Scrum guide is a 16 page compact guide, but don't think that once you study the guide, you are done. Every sentence of the scrum guide is a potential question for PSM1 exam. So the key is "Read, Interpret, Read, Interpret" and so on.
4. To understand the scrum guide, I read "The Scrum Master Training Manual". This manual is a nice try to explain the Scrum Guide in an easy way.
5. You may need an additional hand to understand the guide. Here comes the "Scrum Narrative and Psm Exam Guide" by Mr. Musthafa Shaukat Ali. It is available just for $10 and believe me, it is worth the investment. This guide is totally based on official Scrum guide and holds you hands while explaining the scrum guide in detail. Moreover it covers the additional topics (in brief) which generally appear in exam. Questions are given after each topic (rather each paragraph) to cement you understanding. There are additional quizzes and finally an excellent assessment more or less like the real exam. I did that assessment and got 96.3% and surprisingly scored the same in real exam. Kudos to author. I contacted the author and he replied and advised me with his valuable comments. And I passed the exam.
6. As guided by the author of above guide, I did the Mikhail Laphsin assessment freely available on internet which is also an excellent resource.
Once you cover all that and get above 90+ you are ready for the exam. No need to look anywhere else. Otherwise you can get a wrong understanding of the original and official scrum.
The interface of the exam is not very attracting and it is raw, so you may not feel good while giving the exam. But be confident. You may get at least 10-15 questions from Scrum Open Assessment, so keep doing the Scrum Open Assessment until you have every answer in your brain. It will help you to save a lot of time as you can do these 10-15 questions in 3-4 minutes.
Rest all depends on how you do it in that one hours when you are doing the exam. But once again, please restrict yourself to official scrum and that is the key.
Good luck.
Thanks
Anil
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