APICS Exams (meet upper lev reqs for Business Operations Management)

[soltran]

G'day ridin8ude,

I am currently employed as an inventory manager for a global organization so I do have industry experience which does help, but for the CPIM exams it wasn't required. I am also currently enrolled in the Operations Management course and the Project Management course at Excelsior (it is easier for me to do courses than get away from work to do exams), both of which cover material that is relevant to the CPIM exams.

As for sitting 2 tests in one day, I spent about 2 weeks preparing for the first two tests and was willing to gamble the $110 test fee because of the 30 day retake policy and the fact that it was a 100 mile drive to get to the test center. Both tests were 3 hours long, I started at 8am and was finished both exams before 10:30. I asked the testing center if I could book 3 exams the next time and was informed that it wasn't allowed because regardless of how quickly an exam was completed they were paid for 3 hours and as they were only open for 8 hours on a Saturday they couldn't charge for 9 hours for the 3 exams on the one day.

As far as being able to handle more than 1 exam at a time, I didn't think it was that difficult. This may be due to my background but I think most people would be able to handle multiple exams with enough preparation. I gave myself 2 weeks to prepare for the first 2 exams, two weeks to prepare for the second 2 exams and 2 weeks to prepare for the last exam. At the same time I was working 40 hours a week, enrolled in 2 courses that required weekly assignments and sat two mid-term exams. As you can see, it wasn't exactly dedicated preparation but it was enough to pass all the exams.

If you take the exams in the order they are presented on the APICS website, each exam seems to overlap the previous exam. This progression helps when taking more than 1 exam at a time. Also, if you are reasonably ok with basic math a number of the questions on the first 4 exams will be pretty easy. For example, you produce 1000 units of a product but you have a 10% scrap rate, customer orders total 850 units; have you produced enough to meet customer orders?

As far as the CIRM exams are concerned, I didn't discuss these specifically with Excelsior but they did state that they follow the ACE guidelines which you can view here ACENET CPIM

I found the guidelines a little confusing, especially for the middle 3 CPIM exams where the guidelines state 3 credits per exam but all 3 exams have to be successfully completed to earn credits. As I intended to sit all 5 exams I got Excelsior to provide in writing what credits I would be awarded on completion of all 5 exams (and I asked them to verify this twice). The CIRM exams state the same thing so I would definitely verify with Excelsior before you make any decisions.

I hope this has been of some assistance.

Regards