You can usually find practice tests online for most certifications. If you have any coworkers who have passed ask them. I'm an advanced optician and just dragged one of my (untreated ADHD) coworkers through passing her abo exam. Having someone who knows what will be on the test is more useful than trying to memorize every aspect that might be there.
Best advice IMO-- Practice tests build your intuition for the real thing, even if the intuition is dumb, lol. But yeah you just gotta reverse-engineer how you'd arrive at the right answer from the question... Which can still be hard.
Practice tests. These exams are designed to trip you up so you have to learn the methodology they use to create the questions as much as the material itself. Unfortunately I don't have better advice I'm not great at certification exams either. I just know practice tests got me through what flashcards and studying the material couldn't.
Is the exam exclusively on paper or is there a verbal option? Paper exams can be stressful for anyone, so if you find that explaining things to a person much easier, perhaps you can ask for an accommodation to take the exam with a proctor verbally rather than written. Good luck!
Assuming it's the PMP, you can buy flashcards online that cover all of the material. If you're like me, you just have to make it through the flashcards. Start easy by doing 10-20 cards, then add another 10 once you can go through the originals well enough, keep going until you knock out the whole deck. It's probably about a good week of studying if you dedicate a couple hours to it. You can have pretty much the whole thing memorized by then.
It's the CAPM, apprently because I went to college over 10 years ago instead of getting a degree I can't get the PMP yet. But I belive there is cards for that one as well. Hopefully the prices are not as insane as the textbooks.
Keep in mind: last I checked, PMI was in the process of transitioning from PMBOK 6th Edition to 7th Edition for exams. 6th Edition was much more based on an explicit linear process, whereas 7th is much more focused on broad non-linear concepts (to better capture Agile methodologies). It'll probably be helpful to review study materials for both.
Yeah practice tests are the way. This isn't the only industry that asks ridiculous questions to keep the passing rate low.
Does anyone at work actually care if you pass or not? It sounds like taking the exam was more your idea than a job requirement. In that case, maybe the pressure you're feeling is mostly self-imposed... Like maybe it's fine if you demonstrate in some other way that you made good use of the funding and time for training, but just couldn't pass the poorly-written exam.
I think it's possible to set expectations like "wow I really benefitted from this course, and I'm looking forward to applying what I learned at work... But you wouldn't believe how clumsy the exam questions are. I'm going to give it a shot, but tbh if I don't pass the first time, I think I'd rather just forget about the cert instead of wasting energy chasing it. What do you think?"
Of course you still want to give it your best shot and learn how to solve this sort of thing, but hopefully you can do it from a place of confidence and desire for growth... not a place of terror, lol.
P.S. I dunno if this is helpful or not, but I think sometimes they make certification exams obtuse on purpose so that you're not likely to pass the first time... Especially when they're like $150 a pop. They want it to appear like a high standard, but it's hard to do that in a fair way, so they settle for badly articulated moon logic.
I haven't done any exams in project management, but done quite few technical ones varying in difficulty as well as some basic ITIL ones. The best advice I can give and what has helped me, is that there's no trick questions.
As long as you understand the topic well enough, think simple. If you think one of the answers seems correct, go with it. Don't overthink
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