First off, a big thank you to everyone here posting their study tips, sources, triumphs, and failures. I'm certain I never would have passed without the extra resources I discovered here. Here was my journey overall start to finish.

I'm a Navy nuke submarine veteran who got out about a year ago which was when I did my 35 hour PMP bootcamp for free through a program called Onward to Opportunity (O2O) provided by Syracuse University. I recorded all the sessions as they were virtual, but never rewatched them.

Then, I had to go through all my training videos on Percipio - these were actually pretty helpful overall. Then I had to pass a mock test on Percipio from a bank of 500ish questions. Once that was done, I got the voucher to schedule my test. Cue me putting this all on the back burner for several months as I got a new job as a project manager (ironic) without my PMP.

I realized a couple months ago that my window to take the test for free was January, so I started really studying again in earnest. I retook all the Percipio exam questions until I was getting in the 90 percents on a bank of 100 questions.

I got nervous seeing soany successes here - I didn't want to fall on the trap of thinking it was too easy. I decided to pick up some additional study sources and I'm glad I did! Here is how I would rank the sources I used from most to least useful.

1. PMI Study Hall (SH) - This was by far the most useful tool. I sprung for the 5 practice exams one. These questions were far different from the Percipio ones. While the Percipio exams were good for testing general knowledge, the SH questins were very similar to the test and written in the same scenario style. I got mod 60s on the SH exams on my first run through. I got an 80ish percent one the first exam going through again and figured I was good there.

2. Adam Ramdayal Udemy Course videos (AR) - Got this on sale for about 15 bucks. I mostly got these for the mindset video section, but I dabbled around on other things. This is a great way to brush up on areas you're weak on. I'm sure I will find myself coming back to these at some point.

3. Percipio videos/practice tests - These don't get mentioned much as I think they may be only available through O2O. These were great overall for learning, but in the context of test preparation, not the most useful. I did like the ability to tailor exam length/question banks to suit my time constraints AND the option to review answers right away so I could get the instant feedback on why I got wrong what I got wrong.

4. David McLauchlin - He has a ton of great videos, I found this one the most helpful personally if you're feeling overwhelmed. It's a speed run through PMBOK7 that wraps up everything really nicely on about an hour. https://youtu.be/2gmCr40uT4U?si=ORRQtm6yXsI9ODa2

Other than that, that's pretty much it for me. As a caveat, I've always been a good test taker and the exam was way easier than most the exams I've taken in the Navy which are just as long in some cases and not multiple choice. I finished in 3 hours as I'm a pretty fast reader too. I took the exam in person as there was a center not far from me and I had heard the horror stories about taking it online from home. Everyone was cool and the exam process was straight forward. Happy to help anyone I can and answer any questions you have.

Again, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH! You can do this, it's not as hard as it seems. Best of luck to everyone and Happy Thanksgiving!