Struggling with Mindset
Wanting to share my experience pursuing the PMP exam and the struggles I’ve had throughout the process. Throwaway account for obvious reasons.
I started studying in December with a PMTraining course. The instructor was very nice, but I honestly did not leave the course feeling any more prepared for the exam than when I started. The course covered the material, but it didn’t really teach the “PMI mindset” or what actually needs to be understood to pass this exam.
Since then, I’ve watched almost every David McLachlan video and really like his teaching style. His templates and explanations have been a huge help in bringing structure to projects at work, along with helping reinforce what I’ve learned. I’ve also used Study Hall extensively, completed all of the prep questions, and consistently struggle to score above 60–70% on practice questions and exams. Reading others posts on this sub I thought I might be able to pass, I guess not. I tried some AR content as well, but I struggled to stay focused with some of the explanations.
At this point, I’m really struggling to get into the “PMI mindset.” As someone with a learning disability who struggled through college, this has honestly been one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to accomplish. I know that I'm an object learner and cannot wrap my head around this exam content. A lot of this exam feels more like psychology than managing projects in the real world, which has been incredibly frustrating for me.
I’ve spent over 100 hours studying, finally took the exam, and it was an epic failure - NI in all categories on taking the test today. I genuinely do not know where to go from here.
The entire process has honestly been a challenge from start to finish - the application, scheduling with the testing center, accommodation coordination, the extended scheduling timelines, and then the actual exam experience itself. My accommodation is paper testing with extra time in a quiet room to limit distractions, which already makes scheduling significantly more difficult because PMI requires someone onsite to manually enter the results as I go. Im not even in total silence. The process itself has been exhausting.
The absolute worst part of this entire experience was my originally scheduled exam on 4/15/26. I took the day off work, arrived to test, and the first question of of the exam setup did not match what was in the system. Escalated this to the proctor and PMI needed to investigate what went wrong. As a result, the exam had to be scrapped and rescheduled. There was literally no way for me to take the test on the date I had originally scheduled.
Any recommendations are welcome.