Getting Through PMI ACP Exam Prep With Mike Griffiths
I'll be honest, the PMI ACP exam has gone through enough changes that I needed to recalibrate my own understanding recently. PMI retired the old ACP exam format and restructured it around more practical domain areas. When I pulled together study materials, I ended up going back to Mike Griffiths' course because his breakdown of agile practices actually maps onto what the current exam asks. That doesn't mean it's perfect. It means it got me past a few sections faster than scrambling through random blog posts. Here is how I used it and what I would tell someone starting from scratch.
PMI ACP Exam Prep Mike Griffiths Approach
Griffiths structures the material around the seven domains that make up the current PMI-ACP exam: agile principles and mindset, stakeholder engagement, team dynamics, value delivery, planning, adaptive project execution, and problem prevention and resolution. He doesn't just list these. He walks through each one with enough scenario-based explanation that you actually start seeing the pattern the exam uses. The biggest thing most people miss is that the exam is not a definition test. It is a situational judgment test disguised as an agile exam. You will get questions where two answers look right. The trick is figuring out which answer aligns with the agile mindset PMI is rewarding, not which answer is technically correct in a traditional PMO context. I spent about twelve to fourteen hours across the course over three weeks. That felt about right. More than that and I was just re-reading material I already understood. Less than that and I was guessing on the situational questions during the practice exams.
One edge case I ran into that I still remember clearly: I kept getting tripped up on questions about when to involve the project sponsor or key stakeholders during sprints. The course frames this around servant leadership and transparency, but the actual exam questions would sometimes phrase things in a way that made it sound like the answer was to escalate to the sponsor immediately. I started writing down every wrong answer I got and noticed a pattern. The wrong answers always involved going to authority before trying to resolve at the team level first. Once I flipped my instinct to assume the team handles it internally unless there is a genuine dependency escalation, my practice scores jumped from around sixty percent to somewhere in the high seventies within a week. That worked for me. YMMV. The approach that helped me was treating each practice question as if I were the agile project manager in the room, not the person grading the test. Ask yourself what the most collaborative, team-empowered next step would be. There are a few downsides to be aware of. Griffiths is very thorough, which means the course is long. If you are short on time, you will skip sections and regret it later because those skipped sections are exactly where the harder questions live. The practice questions also lean heavily toward Scrum and Kanban scenarios. Lean, XP, and TDD get mentioned but not nearly as deep coverage. If your workplace uses a lot of XP practices, you will need supplemental reading outside the course.
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I also found that the course materials have not been updated as aggressively as the exam outline has shifted. A few examples reference older PMI terminology that no longer appears on the current exam. You do not need to worry about memorizing those terms, but do not let them distract you either. Stick to the domain descriptions PMI publishes on their website and use the course to understand the concepts behind them, not to memorize exact phrasing. What I actually did differently than most people: I took the official PMI ACP Exam Prep Mike Griffiths course videos at 1.5x speed the first pass, then watched the sections I scored poorly on at normal speed the second pass. I also printed the exam content outline from PMI's website and went through it line by line after finishing the course. That helped me map what I had learned back to the exact wording PMI uses when they write the questions. For practice exams, I used a combination of the ones included with the course and a third-party set I found online. The course questions tend to be closer to the real exam in tone and difficulty. The third-party ones were sometimes easier, sometimes oddly worded, but useful for building stamina. I did three full practice exams under timed conditions. The first two were rough. The third was where things clicked.
If you are looking for where to get the course, PMI's official training partners page lists Mike Griffiths' materials. The exact URL shifts depending on where PMI redirects current offerings, so searching for the PMI-ACP course on their site will get you to the right place without me dropping a link that might be stale by the time you read this. Another counter-intuitive thing: studying agile theory does not automatically help with the agile questions if you have never actually worked on an agile team. The situational questions assume a certain practical intuition. If you have only ever worked in waterfall environments, I would recommend shadowing an agile team at your workplace or watching real sprint ceremonies on YouTube before you go deeper into the material. It sounds odd, but it made a noticeable difference in how I interpreted questions about daily standups, sprint planning, and backlog refinement. The exam itself is ninety minutes, seventy-five questions, and requires a score of approximately sixty-two percent to pass. The cut score is set by PMI using a standard-setting process, so the exact threshold can vary slightly by form. Do not obsess over hitting eighty percent on practice exams. Just make sure you are consistently in the high sixties to low seventies range across multiple attempts. That gives you enough buffer for the actual exam's difficulty variance.
I do not recommend cramming for this exam. The material is broad and the questions require you to differentiate between similar concepts quickly. Two solid weeks of consistent study beats a four-day marathon every time. If you want a more focused alternative, PMI also offers their own online training program directly, and the Scrum Study Guide by Karl Wiegers is useful for the Scrum-heavy portions of the exam. Neither replaces Griffiths entirely, but they cover different angles. I stuck with Griffiths as my primary resource and filled gaps as needed. The bottom line is that Griffiths' prep material is solid, not flawless. It covers the right domains, explains them in a way that matches the exam's reasoning style, and includes enough practice questions to build confidence. You will need to supplement it slightly for the leaner topics and you will need to adjust for any terminology drift between older editions and the current exam. But it is one of the better options available and it is what I used successfully.
