I'm not proud of it, but I failed the PMP twice before passing last month. First attempt I scored around 60% across the board and honestly didn't understand the Agile vs. predictive split until after I failed. The exam is roughly 50% predictive and 50% Agile or hybrid now, and if you're coming from a waterfall background like I was, that second half will wreck you.
My third attempt I did 6 weeks of focused prep, about 2 hours a day on weekdays and 4 hours on weekends. I went through the Agile Practice Guide front to back three times and completed at least 400 practice questions before sitting. The situational questions are what make or break you — they're not testing what you know, they're testing how you'd handle a team crisis as a servant leader.
My passing attempt came back AT, AT, BT — Above Target on two domains and Below Target on Business Environment, which has always been my weakest. Still passed. The passing threshold isn't published officially but community consensus puts it somewhere around 61–65% correct.
Same experience here. I came from construction project management and figured I'd cruise through since I've managed $40M projects. Nope. The Agile sections got me on attempt one and I had to actually learn Scrum properly before attempt two. Passed AT, AT, AT after 5 weeks of daily practice.
The situational questions are genuinely hard to prepare for. I found doing 20–30 of them daily — not timed, just really sitting with why each answer is right — helped far more than full 180-question mocks where I just checked the score. It's about building pattern recognition, not speed.
One thing that helped me was tracking which question types I got wrong, not just the domains. I kept missing "what do you do FIRST" questions even when I knew the content cold. Turned out I was overthinking urgency vs. importance. Once I fixed that mental model my practice scores jumped about 8 points.
Six weeks seems to be about the sweet spot from what I hear. I tried to rush it in 3 weeks and failed, then did a proper 7-week plan and passed. Don't underestimate the ethics and stakeholder engagement domain — it shows up more than most guides suggest.