Forums

Hello everyone,


It's been two years now I'm using Scrum in a few projects, and currently taking a leap forward to promote and implement it in my organization.


For that matter, I plan to follow a PSPO course and pass the PSM II exam soon, so I have a few questions regarding the last one.


- How many questions are there in the PSM II exam? Read somewhere it was about 50 questions with 40% as essays, is that right?

- Does it tend to evaluate the candidates on other agile topics than Scrum? If yes, which ones?

- Are there feedbacks provided with the results?


Thanks in advance for your advice and tips. In the meantime, I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year! ;)


Kind regards,


Romain

Hi Romain,

all the best for you in promoting Scrum in your organization! Let us know how it goes.

I suggest you take a look at this blog: http://scrumorakel.de/blog/index.ph...ments.html
Some of your questions might be answered there. The amount of essay questions varies du to a randomizer. When I did the PSM II, it was 45 questions - but I guess the randomizer might cause a varying number of questions as well.
Other agile topics are not evaluated, but you have to know how to best apply Scrum in a real scenario. That means, you will most likely fail if you don't have practical experience.
You usually do not get feedback together with the result. If you are interested in it, you can ask support@scrum.org for hints. However, do not expect them to provide you with specific questions or answers. They will just tell you something vague like "focus on the scrum master role when preparing your next attempt".

Merry Christmas!

Dominik

Hi Dominik,

Thanks for the info! I already browsed your blog for the PSM I certification, and it is really helpful. Also for enlightening the randomizer matter, since I read some folks were quite surprised about it when passing the exam.

Regarding the feedbacks, this is mostly about the hints I'll be looking forward to receive. More than getting a certification, my objectives are to inspect and adapt whenever I can first! ;)

Kind regards,

Romain

Hi Dominik, I've just read the advices posted in the blog you added the link for it. So my question for you is: Do you think that by only studying the scrum guide is enough for me to pass in the exam? I see that people usually have a course which they spend about 1 week practicing and learning about Scrum in order to be prepared for the test. So I was wondering if it is really valid to take those course or not for the PSM I.
Thanks

Hi Amanda,

"Do you think that by only studying the scrum guide is enough for me to pass in the exam?"

> In my opinion, it's clearly not enough, and as Dominik highlightened it in his blog, you need to clearly understand the Scrumguide, or more generally the Scrum's artifacts. Simply reading the guide and not knowing their purposes can easily mislead you on the trickiest questions.

I didn't follow any Scrum.org course yet, but as I observed so far with colleagues that were new to Scrum, practising it on a very low scale, or even on fake projects, reading a few books clearly help though for the PSM I exam.

Kind regards,

Romain

Adriana,

Keep in mind that this thread is about the PSM II exam. You mention the PSM I exam, so I'll limit my advice to that exam.

Reading the Scrum Guide is probably enough(I'd recommend reading it 2-4 times), so long as you follow the rest of Dominik's advice for PSM I as well.

Taking one of the Scrum.org classes would also help you greatly with PSM I, but, IMO, it is not necessary to pass the PSM I so long as you do your own prep like Dominik suggested.

As an aside, I would strongly recommend the Professional Scrum Master class before taking the PSM II.

Hello everyone,

Well, I took the PSM II exam a few days ago, leaving time to give some thoughts about it. So here is a quick review of my experience, hoping it will provide some useful tips without spoiling for the future candidates.

The exam had 35 questions, about 2/3 of them were essays. Answering to them all in two hours is pretty challenging in my opinion, for a non-native English speaker. I personally left some blanks, so be ready to catch the global sense of some potential multiple sub-questions pretty quickly, and consider not having time to review them. Get straight to the point while typing your answers, the timebox is short, no doubt about that.

The content was anyway pretty amazing, the challenge intense, like a philosophy exam during my school days. :) You can't get an answer just out of the book, your brain and SM's reflexes are your only tools here. The topics are various for that amount of questions and can be a bit "out of the road".

I couldn't agree more with Dominik regarding his advice to pass the exam, especially about experience: yes, be a Scrum Master for a while to acquire the expertise and reflexes. Having played the role of Product Owner is also a great plus. Had the following link with the token order, that I couldn't find elsewhere (http://www.scrum.org/Assessments/Wa...ut-Scrum). Those advised requirements are not enough, for a PSM II exam at least, in my humble opinion. Oh, and also pass the new open PSD I assessment with a great score before!

Hope this answers some questions around the Scrum community. I don't have the results yet, but in any case, taking the exam really worth it!

Kind regards,

Romain

Following-up on Romain's advice, I took the PSM II exam last week and while I am still awaiting my results, I would HIGHLY recommend viewing the 2 ScrumBut videos linked from this page: http://www.scrum.org/scrumbut. Not only are they incredibly informative videos, they provide great context for the types of questions you may see on the exam.
-Jason Osborne

Around 45 questions and No, other areas are not evaluated

http://www.agiledistributed.com/