PASS PSM I with 90% at the FIRST TRY and 4 DAYs of PREPARATION

I am so happy to share that I recently passed PSM I. With Challenging time at work front and working from home with my young daughter attending school virtually, it was indeed very difficult to prepare. However, I am very happy with the outcomes and many thanks to my supportive family specially my spouse.

I want to share my few study tips, which really worked well with my setup and schedule

• Read and thoroughly understand Scrum guide. Read it several times. I preferred reading a printed copy of the guide, so I printed and kept the copy always hardy with me.
• I personally didn’t start doing the mock tests unless I was pretty sure that I am clear with scrum concepts. I think on my third time reading the guide, I felt pretty confident and started doing mock tests.
• Obviously, I started the mock test marathon with scrum.org open assessment. I gave PSM I and PSPO 1 open assessments several times. At least once every day till I finally gave the exam. Do not assume that the real assessment is of the same difficulty level as the practice assessment. The real assessment is definitely harder.
• I also did Mikhail Lapshin’s mock tests. This website has Learning mode and Real Mode. I gave both the versions several times. Its very useful website.
• One important thing which I felt really worked with me was, going back to scrum guide after doing the scrum mock tests and concentrating on wording for the focus areas where I was not hitting the right answers in mock test. For example, DT creates the increment, owns the DoD, Owns the Sprint Backlog
• I am personally a person of picture book and acronyms, so I prefer creating some picture as it easy to register a picture in mind rather than wording. Hence, since beginning of my preparation I created so many Pictures. Like Sprint events, their time-boxes and who must/should attend those meetings etc. I also created some acronyms for easy notes P.O Product owner, S.M – Scrum Master, D.T – Development Time, P.B – Product Backlog etcs.
• In my personal notes (hand written), I created chapters with labels, so any question related to Product Backlog on Mikhail or Scrum guide goes as a note in Product Backlog chapter or section and I created bookmarks in my notes to don’t have to flip too many pages. It might appear lot of work but I did it while reading the scrum guide, doing Scrum.org mock tests, Mikhail Lapshin’s mock tests in learning mode. This came very handy during offline reading hours.
• I spent around 25 hours to prepared for PSM 1.
• I gave my test in early morning hours at 5.00AM with peaceful mind in the morning.
• Good Luck to you, hope this post was useful.

@Rakhi Bhatia Congratulations.

I think you gave the exams based on 2017.

@Nitin , Thanks

Yes I gave my test based on 2017. 

Good Luck!

Congratulation, guys. And thanks for such useful tips.

hi All, For PSM1 exam, should we prepare from both 2017 and 2020 guide?

@Rathiya, no only use the 2020 Scrum Guide.

Thanks for the clarification Eric

Hello  Rakhi Bhatia,

Thanks all for writing the steps for preparing - PSM1 exams.

@Rakhi Bhatia - Kindly can you share the tips of notes .

As I have not worked on Agile projects and just taken up scrum guide classes from my senior with real use cases related to scrum guide. Can you help me with still more lessons learned -.

As Im on career break untill I get job I have to upgrade my skills on Agile - so now cleared CSM and next is PSM1. Kindly need your help in preparing PSM1.

Thanks in Advance @ Rakhi

Hi all, does anyone know if the Mikhail Lapshin’ practice exam is up to date with the 2020 Scrum Guide?