PSM I Passed 95% - Some Preparation Tips...

Hi,

I passed PSM I on my first attempt on 29-May-2017 with 76/80 (95%).  Here are a few tips that might help for other aspirants.

1. Understand the concepts from SCRUM guide.  You need to be really thorough in each and every aspect of it.
    
2. Practice Open assessment a few times. Contrary to some of the suggestions in this forum that Open assessments (both from Scrum and Mikhail Lapshin) to be practiced as many times as possible (some of them suggested twice daily for the entire duration of the preparations),   I preferred to practice only 4-5 times (each assessment) to ensure I can see the entire pool of questions.  By end of the second attempt, you should be able to score close to 100%.}
    
3. It is more important to analyse the questions answered incorrectly during the open assessments and clarifying those questions either referring back to Scrum guide or reading the forum posts than attempting the assessments many times.  If you practice Open assessments too many times, the questions will be repeated, the answers will already be known to you and you will NOT be applying your actual Scrum “know-how” to arrive at a correct answer.  This may have an adverse effect in the real exam as you will suddenly be exposed to a set of new questions where you will need to be using all your Scrum expertise to arrive at the correct answer, something you were not practicing during Open assessments.
    
4. The Scrum forum will help you a lot in developing concepts. There are many good contributors in the forum; however I found Ian Mitchell’s responses are very helpful and consistent with the Scrum guide. The best part of his responses is while replying to a specific Open assessment question, he normally doesn’t specify the exact option that is the correct one (I am sure he is well aware of it though), rather suggests some pointers in the right direction to probe it further. This ensures you actually search more in the Scrum guide to find the correct answer by yourself. This helps further enhancing one’s the Scrum concepts.
    
5. One of the best exam practices I normally follow was suggested by Rita Mulcahy (the famous author of PMP exam preparation) that “DO NOT over prepare” (I even followed this for other exams like PMP, PRINCE 2 and now for PSM1).  Initially I set a target to appear for the exam on 31-May-2017; however preponed to 29-May, once I found myself sufficiently prepared for the exam.   Over preparation creates stress and lowers motivation level.  You are the best judge to assess if you are prepared enough to pass the exam.
    
6. Most importantly keep it simple, stick to the (Scrum) basics.  This will save your time and money.

Best of luck.

Suman