The Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master assessment is a 60 minute test with 80 multiple choice type questions taken from a bigger pool of questions. To pass the assessment, you have to score 85% correct answers, in other words you need to have 68 of 80 questions answered correctly.
I have never worked as Scrum Master before, so I did not have any experience and had to use theoretical knowledge to pass the exam. PSM 1 is the foundation level, so it’s quite doable on this level,
What I did before I studied
Before I studied for a specific assessment I organized interesting blogs, articles, forum topics and free resources within a Microsoft OneNote document. Later I switched to the browser Plugin Toby, which is great to organize bookmarks in categories. Organizing bookmarks and resources in the browser was way more intuitive and faster than using OneNote.
How I studied
I used Anki to learn the Professional Scrum Developer Glossary and the Scrum Glossary with the spaced repetition learning technique. I used Recoll for indexing and searching my digital resources.
I took open assessments everyday, tracked my results in a spreadsheet, so I could see my score stabilize and the average time per question decrease. I always took note of missed questions in a separate word document and also saved the whole assessment session as PDF so Recoll could index it.
The open assessments provided by scrum.org are a good starting point, but the pool of questions is very small compared to the pool of questions in the actual assessment. Nevertheless, the real assessment will contain questions from the open assessments, so you should do your best to know every question of the open assessments. I also used the PSM 1 Learning Quiz by Mikhail Lapshin and found this very useful, as it gives you instant feedback, and the questions are quite similar to the real questions.
I printed the Scrum Guide and read it multiple times. Besides the Scrum Guide I picked some information from the book Scrum and XP from the trenches by Henrik Kniberg but I did not read the whole book.
I was quite anxious to use resources that does not come from scrum.org, so I mainly used the Scrum Guide and the official forum to get my information. That’s why I did not spent money for external test assessments or additional books. Those would be interpretations of other people and might confuse me, so I avoided any external resources except “Scrum and XP from the trenches”, but I was very picky about what information to take in.
I have read books about Scrum in the past and I struggled to forget information I gained from these books, which have proven wrong when applied to open assessments.
Assessment
For the actual asessment, you have 60 minutes, You will see one question per page, so every questions causes internet traffic, so make sure your internet connection is fast and will not be interrupted for the duration of the test.
In the assessment, you’ll have the possibility to mark questions with a bookmark, so you can get to this question later. Try to use this as little as possible. I bookmarked 25 questions (out of 80 = 31%) and finished the last question after 40 minutes. So I had 20 minutes to review 25 questions. This also means, that I had to spent 30 seconds per question on average to answer the question or to make the decision to bookmark it. This is a lot slower compared to my average speed in the open assessment (10 seconds per question).
Don’t expect the real questions to be like the open assessment questions, they are not. Some are easy and others are quite demanding and want you to interpret the situation. Don’t expect that you can google the questions you can’t answer, you won’t find anything useful, and if you do, you simply don’t have enough time to read through the results.
Recommendation
Make a directory to store your scrum.org open assessment results. Use recoll to index these documents. This is quite helpful to find useful information within your test results.
Do the open assessments and the PSM 1 Learning Quiz until you get every question right, consistently.
Don’t use external resources, all the information is in the Scrum Guide. Don’t rely on what you already know, if this is your first scrum.org certification,
I actually used external resources like the Mountain Goat Software Blog and Scrum and XP from the trenches, because I like to gather a lot of information to understand a topic. You can do this as well, but you have to permanently make sure, that the information is in line with the Scrum Guide. If you are uncertain, ask in the Scrum Forum.
Cheers. 🙂