The PMP® Exam is a four-hour multiple choice exam. In these four hours you are going to have to answer 200 questions. Each question is either scenario-based or knowledge-based and has four possible answers: A, B, C, or D. You can only select one answer.
Out of these 200 questions, 25 are considered \"pretest questions\". These pretest questions do not affect your score. The PMI uses them as an effective and legitimate way for testing the usability of the questions. In other words, new questions for the exam are first tried out in this way to see how well they work. The pretest questions are randomly placed throughout the exam.
So you start out with 200 questions minus the 25 pretest questions, which leaves 175 questions. Out of these you must answer 106 correctly. That is 61%. If you would like more details on this I recommend that you read the PMP Credentials Handbook, which you can find here: http://www.pmi.org/PDF/PDC_PMPHandbook.pdf.
At the end of your exam you will be handed a printed score report that shows whether or not you have passed. However, this sccore report does not tell you the exact percentages of how you did. Instead, the score report will show you a proficiency level for all of the domains (Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling and Professional Responsibility). For the CAPM Exam this is per chapter of the PMBOK Guide. The proficiency levels are as follows:
- Proficient - indicates performance is above the average level of knowledge in this domain
- Moderately Proficient - indicates performance that is at the average level of knowledge in this domain
- Below Proficient - indicates performance is below the average level of knowledge in this domain
In other words you will find two levels of information provided on your score report. One is the overall examination results, which tell you whether you passed or failed. The second is a picture of your overall strengths and weaknesses within each domain. This is a diagnostic representation (not an exact number or percentage) of your proficiency level per domain for PMP and PgMP and by chapter for CAPM.
A percentage score is not more exact than proficiency levels because it is not a raw score and each domain does not equal 100%. That is why, for example, if you got a percentage score in the Initiation Domain of 54%, you do not know if this is above or below average for that domain. PMI instituted the scoring levels of Below Proficient, Proficient and Moderately Proficient as a means for providing more meaningful guidance to candidates about their performance in each Domain.
Regards,
Cornelius Fichtner, PMP
Principal Instructor
The Project Management PrepCast™
