Tips for PSM 1 Assessment

Here is what worked for me:

Tips

Scrum Guide/Other Sources

• Studied the Scrum Guide with the attitude of how to apply what I was learning, oftentimes reading it out loud and putting it in my own words.
• Semi-memorized what appeared to be really important lists and key word groupings.
• Became very familiar with everything in the Guide, in general. I found this really helped me, because during the Assessment, I didn’t have time to refer back to the Guide.
• If I didn’t understand what something meant in the Guide, I looked it up.
• Devoted five days straight to studying, and then took the test the next day.
• I never read any of the books Scrum.org suggested.
• As some mentioned on these Forums, understand burndown charts. Sprint 0 doesn’t exist as well.
• If you’ve learned Scrum from other sources, you may have to unlearn some aspects if they don’t coincide with the Guide (which happened to me).

Free Online Assessments

The key here is to take these assessments multiple times so that you can very quickly answer easy questions automatically. This ability is very important to do on the test. You’ll need that extra time to review the questions you’re not sure of.

• I didn’t need to pay for access to any practice tests.
• I took the Scrum.org Online Assessments many times until I consistently got 100%: Scrum Open and Product Owner Open. I tried the Software Developer Open once and got a 40% and didn’t take it again. I didn’t find it that useful.
• Mikhail Lapshin’s practice exams were invaluable, learning and real-mode. I took these until I consistently got 100% and was able to run through them quickly.
• I took other free-trial online assessments that were recommended in these forums (Volkerdon, etc.), keeping in mind that there might be some answers in them that don’t align to the Scrum Guide. Some of these helped, because they showed more scenarios of applying Scrum.

Prep the Day of PSM 1 Assessment

• Skimmed through the Scrum Guide
• Quickly ran through the two Open Assessments and the Mikhail assessment, real-mode before the test

The PSM 1 Assessment

• If I was spending too much time on questions that weren’t automatic answers, I moved on.
• Bookmarked anything that I wasn’t sure of the answer.
• Wrote down on a separate sheet of paper the questions that I really didn’t know the answer to.
• When I finished the 80 questions, with 20 minutes to spare, I first ran through the ones I’d written down.
• Then I reviewed the bookmarked questions that weren’t written down.

This is what worked for me, and I hope this helps some of you!