I PASSED THE PSM III!!!

I haven't posted in a very long while here. I'll start from the beginning so get your popcorn ready cause its going to be a long story.

So after my last post here, I began studying for the PSM III, a guy on here messaged me and he had the same goal as me. Fast forward a week or two and now its january, that's when i took it for the first time (and I got humbled lol).

The way I prepared was using the deeper into scrum on the agile for humans yt channel, and the Q&A sessions from scrum.org and a whole lot of podcasts and i read a bunch of books and answered about 60 essay questions.

During the exam, i was pretty nervous (it got me sweating and stuff), and it was nothing like the questions I practiced but I answered all questions barely within the time box. it was definitely one of the most challenging exams I ever took. After the exam, I was feeling good and somewhat confident but as time went on I started to lose my confidence and I thought about all the ways how I could've answered the questions better.

I got my results a month later, and I was shocked, I got like 60%!! about 35% of the feedback was that the language of my answers wasn't up to date with the scrum guide 2020. Like saying self-organizing instead of self-managing or servant leadership vs a true leader etc.

The other guy that took it too got his results and didn't pass. after talking for a bit he proposed a theory that they keep track of those who took courses from scrum.org and attempted the psm3 (group1) and those who didn't take any courses but took the psm3 (group2) and said that they would pass those within group 1 until they reach a certain threshold and then they will select a handful of people to pass from group 2 based on chance, with the goal of keeping the % of group 1 higher than 2 to promote their courses.

That theory made some sense to me and he said there was no point in attempting again and I agreed. I also agreed with him that the grading is somewhat subjective to a certain extent and the feedback is not in-depth but that's normal i guess, given that if they went into details they would be giving out the question or your answer.

Anyway, a couple of weeks went by and I tried to distract myself from the failure but I just couldn't leave it alone and at the end I bought the test again and i had to go back to the feedback and prepare. I increased my typing speed by 3wpm (it was 65wpm) and thought about the structure of how I'm going to answer the questions now that i have an idea of them and make sure to answer all parts of the question and use the scrum guide language.

At the end of March, I felt like I was ready and I took it. This time I was a lot more relaxed and followed the plan I had for answering the questions and used all the allotted time. I couldn't answer everything unfortunately but I was feeling good about it.

Despite me being 2x more confident than on the first attempt, I was checking my email every day and I was kinda obsessed to the point that one day I dreamt of passing with a score of 87%. I took a software engineering certificate from Coursera to occupy my mind, and I finished the 14 courses in less than a month.

Since I still didn't get the results, I was thinking that a SM should understand the PO role well enough to be able to help them, and I went straight to the PSPO II. The exam was more difficult than the PSM II for me but somehow I got 94%. All I did to prepare was read The Professional Product Owner Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage by Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham.

A couple of days went by and I checked my email after waking up like usual and saw that I passed with a score of 86% lol I was relieved and surprised too that my dream almost got it right. After reading the feedback, I was once again humbled to know all the things I got to work on now, and it made me think that learning is a never-ending journey.

But yeah you can ask me anything and ill answer them when I can.