Professional Scrum Master (PSM I) Certification as self study

  • Post by Viktor Papara
  • Nov 02, 2022
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TL;DR

Can I recommend doing the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) Certification as self study? Yes, with the restriction that you get the practical experience somewhere else, this can be a valid alternative to a special preparation course.

What are the restrictions?

There are special preparation courses for the PSM I Certification and they are great. Their main benefit is the sharing of experience between the trainer and the participants. In self study you don’t get that, obviously. So if you decide to go for this self study approach, my recommendation is to find other scrum masters to share experience and ideas.

At my company we get a budget of training days per year and this year my day budget was already used for other trainings. But I didn’t want to wait long for the next PSM I training, so I took the impatient route 😅.

How much time did I spend on preparing?

All in All it took me 8 - 12 hours, spread over about 4 weeks, but with more intense 4 days before the exam:

  • 3-4 hours of Reading/Listening to the Scrum Guide
  • 1-2 hours of following the Scrum Master Path
  • 2-3 hours of doing Open Assessments
  • 2-3 hours of talking to other scrum masters from my company

Resources

What Resources did I discard?
  • External Exam Simulators
    • Other than the official Open Assessment, there are other semi-legitimate exam simulators. I did not use them because they appear to be based on an earlier version of the Scrum Guide and I did not want to learn “wrong” knowledge.
    • Also, In the end it turns out that I did succeed without them so they are empirically optional 😄.
  • Online Courses
    • Are great if you’re starting from scratch. For this first PSM I Certification, the free resources were fully enough to pass the exam
  • Scrum Master Learning Path
    • https://www.scrum.org/pathway/scrum-master
    • Looks great. It’s a curated collection of blog posts, videos and such. It’s very long. I started to go through it but realized that it was too much time. It’s great though to look for specific topics.

When am I ready for the exam?

This is maybe the most tricky question. An exam attempt does come with a cost of $200 so I did not take it lightly. This is what I’ve used for guidance:

  • Being able to do the Open Assessments for PSM I with constantly 100% accuracy and PSPO I with about 100% accuracy. In about 1/3rd of the allowed time.
  • Knowing the current Scrum Guide almost by heart. Knowing the important data and numbers like the 3 Artefacts, the 5 Events, their time boxes and who is mandatory to be present…
  • Knowing what all the terms in the Scrum glossary. Not completely, but so that you know what each roughly means.

Advice for taking the exam

Be aware of what this exam tests and what it does not. It tests that you have read the Scrum Guide and understand it the way the creators do. It does not test your experience with Scrum or additional connections to other frameworks.

It helped me to mentally approach this exam with the strategy to pass this specific exam. Instead of showing my knowledge of Scrum. This means that the following tactics helped me for the exam alone and their usefulness ends with the exam.

  • The exam looks exactly like the Open Assessment. It’s user interface and behavior is exactly the same.
  • Never go against the Scrum Guide. Any answer that suggests to deviate from the Scrum Guide is wrong in the eyes of the exam.
  • About 50% of the questions I already have seen 1:1 from the Open Assessment
  • You have 60 minutes for 80 questions
    • That’s quite a pace. This is why it’s important to be able to do the Open Assessment very quickly. You will see those questions and answering them quickly gives you more time for unexpected questions that make you stumble.
  • Your exam environment is not technically checked at all. You could easily open other browser tabs and look for the answers, but you simply don’t have the time for it 🙂.
  • About 10% of the questions were tricky to me and I needed more time to think about them.
  • You can mark questions like these so that at the end you can review them again.
    • This review of the tricky questions did not help me much. Unclear questions remained unclear even after a revisit.
  • Pay extra attention to the metadata of a question
    • How many answers are you supposed to tick?
    • Should you pick the best or the worst answers? (some questions are flipped logically)
    • Spot Scrum anti-terms, i.e. terms that Scrum is actively discarding. For example “project manager” is explicitly not part of Scrum, so any answer with this term is probably against Scrum.
    • There are also answers with other terms from classical project management, those answers are wrong in the eyes of the exam.

What’s your experience with the PSM I exam on scrum.org? Let’s discuss this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ViktorPapara/status/1589227662106447872

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  • Post By Viktor Papara
  • Nov 02, 2022
Professional Scrum Master (PSM I) Certification as self study
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