Gearing Up for the Foundation Exam

For the Foundation exam, you can’t have any reference material to hand at all, not even the PRINCE2 manual. It’s a closed-book exam, so everything needs to be in that fluffy space between your ears! You may think you’d like to have some clean paper to hand to make notes during the exam, but actually you won’t need it.

Marking up your answers

The exam consists of a question paper and an answer sheet. The answer sheet has printed ovals on it, and you use a pencil to fill in completely the oval you choose, or to put a very thick bar across the middle, to show your answer to a question. Figure 2-1 shows the format.

Figure 2-1: The answer sheet ­format.

Be sure to put a very thick bar across the oval or fill it in completely, since the paper will be cross-checked by a machine, and the optical reader can fail to see thin lines, ticks, crosses, circles and spots. You must use only pencil on the answer sheet, and if you change your mind on an answer, make sure that you rub out the previous pencil marking very thoroughly. If the machine detects pencil in two ovals, you will not receive any marks for that question.

Understanding the Foundation question style

All Foundation questions are the classic style of a question and then four possible answers. The following example shows the classic format used in the Foundation exam.

Which of the following is a PRINCE2 principle?

a) Manage by roles

b) Manage by products

c) Manage by wishful thinking

d) Manage by exception

The correct answer is d), although, like me, you may be aware of many organisations where everyone is convinced the right answer should be c).

Sometimes a paper contains more than 75 questions. There may appear to be 75, but some questions are comprised of up to four ‘true or false’ questions, and you need to get all of them right to score the single mark. The following simple example illustrates the multiple true/false format.

Read the following four statements about days of the week.

A. The day after Monday is Tuesday.

B. Friday is the only day of the week beginning with the letter F.

C. The day after Thursday is Sunday.

D. Two days of the week begin with the letter S.

Which of the statements are correct?

a) A, B and C

b) A, C and D

c) B, C and D

d) A, B and D

Because Sunday isn’t the day after Thursday, statement ‘C’ is false. The answer is therefore ‘d’, because statements A, B and D are correct.

You need to appreciate two important points for this sort of question:

Be careful to pick the right answer from the list. Having done all the hard work and decided correctly, in the example above, that Sunday doesn’t come straight after Thursday, don’t go and pick the wrong option from the answer list because you’re under pressure and get careless.

Remember that this type of question can be put in the negative. For example, ‘Which item on the list is NOT . . . ?’ Be careful not to lose track of the negative. Again, if you’re feeling under pressure of time, you can forget that you’re dealing with ‘not’. You see a correct statement and go for it without really looking at the rest, only to lose the mark.

To help keep track of what’s true and what’s false as you’re working through the list on the question paper, it’s sensible to write ‘T’ or ‘F’ against each item. If you rely on your memory, you run the risk of forgetting what you thought was right, and so can end up picking the wrong option, even though your initial thinking was correct, or wasting time because you need to check the first items all over again.

Writing on the question paper

Although you can only use pencil on the answer sheet, you can write all over the question paper with anything you like. So that can be pencil again, or pen, or coloured pencils or a highlighter. A lot of people find marking up the paper helpful to emphasise things as they are reading.

Developing a strategy for Foundation

It helps to have a strategy, so you know how you’ll approach the Foundation paper. This is down to you and what you know works well for you, but this section gives some overall advice and also some specific pointers on the nature of the exam and a few pitfalls to avoid. This section also covers one or two problems you may encounter in the exam, for which it pays to decide in advance what you’ll do if you come across them.

Getting some marks in the can

Some questions in the exam can have difficult wording. Over the years the wording has improved, but at the time of writing it’s still a problem occasionally. In addition, you’re going to find questions in some subject areas easier to answer than others. For this reason, it often makes sense to deal first with the questions that you can answer immediately or with a bit of thought, and put more difficult ones on hold and come back to them later.

As I pointed out earlier, in the section ‘Writing on the question paper’, you can mark up the question paper so, if a question is causing you problems, you can put a big star by it on the question paper and come back and have another look at it later.

There are three reasons why putting difficult questions on hold can help:

You build confidence. If you press ahead with questions you can answer, you get some confidence because you have some marks in the can. If the first few questions on the paper are hard (and I’ve seen papers like this), you can become very disheartened. If you decide not to move on until you’ve got to grips with the questions you find difficult and answered them, you see the time slipping by, and it can get to you. You imagine that the whole paper will be like this, and the mounting pressure makes it even harder to concentrate.

You warm up. Even if you’ve done some recent practice with Foundation-level questions, you still warm up during the exam itself. Sometimes when you return to an apparently difficult question, you quickly see what it’s getting at and you can answer it.

Your memory is jogged. Sometimes a question later in the paper on the same subject jogs your memory, and you recall the right answer to the earlier one.

Although I’ve just said that you should put a difficult question on hold, do guess at the answer before you move on; you can always change it later, because your answer on the answer sheet is in pencil. If you don’t have time to return to the question, who knows, your guess may have been right. If you don’t answer it at all, then you’ve no chance of scoring a mark.

Expecting some tough questions

Some people think that multiple choice means easy. If you haven’t already realised, the multiple-choice questions in the PRINCE2 exams can be far from easy. I always think that the questions break down into two basic categories of ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’. Easy questions are where you happen to know the right answer, and difficult questions are where you don’t. The difficult questions break down into two subcategories of tough and awful. Tough ones are where you know you read something about that in PRINCE2 For Dummies last Tuesday, but you can’t quite remember what it was. Awful ones are where you didn’t even know that point is in the method!

Don’t be put off by the fact you’re almost certain to encounter a few questions where you simply don’t know the answer. You’ll find advice later in this section on how to deal with such questions. But the fact is that even if five of the 70 live questions come under the category of ‘awful’, you’ll still have 65 questions to get the 35 marks you need in order to pass.

Avoiding ‘structure’ tactics

Don’t play ‘structure’ games with this exam – they don’t work. Don’t imagine, for example, that about 25 per cent of the answers will be ‘a’, 25 per cent ‘b’ and so on. The danger arises where you’re in doubt about the answer to a particular question and, since there have been very few ‘d’ answers in the exam so far, you conclude that it’s more likely to be ‘d’ than any of the other three options.

The PRINCE2 Foundation exam isn’t built around an even distribution of answer letters. There’s a large pool of questions and these are grouped in topic bands. A few questions are taken from each band, then the rest of the paper is topped up at random out of all of the bands. This is to prevent you getting 75 questions all on, say, processes. Of the questions selected for a paper, there can then be an uneven distribution of ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ answers, because the questions were drawn from the pool by subject, not by answer letter. I saw a paper some years ago where ‘d’ was the correct answer for relatively few questions in the paper. It was just chance, not design.

Equally, don’t be thrown by runs of the same letter as the correct answer. Again this is just chance. The danger here is that you’ve already answered ‘a’ for a run of four questions and you think it may be ‘a’ for the next. However, you determine that ‘a’ is probably not right because the examiners surely wouldn’t have put yet another ‘a’ answer. Remember the structure of the pool and it’s not that the examiners did or didn’t do anything. Of the questions selected from the pool, as it happened there was a run of the same letter for the answers in that part of the paper.

Again, I saw a paper some years ago where the same letter was the correct answer for six questions in a row. The next question had a different letter as the correct answer, but then it went back to the original letter for another two questions after that. It was just chance.

In short, there’s no structural connection between one Foundation question and any other question on the paper. If you think that the correct answer to a question is ‘a’, then select it, no matter what has gone before and no matter how often that letter has been the right answer so far in the exam.

Reading the question

Yes, it’s what they told you at school: RTFQ – Read The Flipping Question! You need to read the exam questions very carefully to be as sure as you can that you’ve properly understood them. If you misread a question, you’re obviously likely to pick the wrong answer.

Guessing answers

Surprisingly, perhaps, this tip is to encourage you to guess. Well, at least to guess where you don’t know what the answer is. There’s no negative marking in the exam, so you won’t be penalised for a wrong answer. Because of that, don’t leave any questions out, and if you don’t know the answer, guess. If there are four possible answers, you have a 25 per cent chance of hitting the right one by guessing.

Life can be hard as a trainer and exam invigilator. I ran a course where one person attending was a Project Manager from New Zealand who had a great sense of humour as well as being technically excellent. During the exam, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and turned to look at him. He had his head up and his eyes closed while he circled his pencil over a question on the exam paper. He stabbed the pencil onto the paper then looked down, nodded and filled in that answer. How I managed not to explode laughing and disrupt the exam I really don’t know. His approach though was exactly right. He got very high marks because of his high level of competence, but on that one question he really didn’t have a clue, so he let his pencil choose. Unfortunately I don’t know which question it was, so I can’t tell you the outcome.

Thinking before you guess

Following on from the last point, before you guess, think. Sometimes it’s possible to rule out one or two of the answers by logic. For example, you know this question has got nothing whatever to do with Start Up and it certainly hasn’t got anything to do with closure. That leaves only two options, and you don’t know which is the right one. So guess! You’ve now increased your chances of hitting the right answer to 50 per cent.

Avoiding talking yourself out of the right answer

When writing something by hand where you haven’t got a spellchecker kicking in, have you ever looked at a correctly spelled word and wondered whether it was right? The more you look at it, the more sure you become that it’s actually spelled wrongly. You can’t think how it should be spelled, but you’re now convinced that the perfectly correct spelling is wrong. The same psychological mechanism comes into play in multiple-choice exams. Having finished the Foundation questions, most candidates go back over them to check their answers, and that’s good practice. Agonising over the answers, however, isn’t good practice. It often happens that someone going over a question again and again ends up changing the initial right answer for a wrong one. So don’t talk yourself out of the right answer.

Before machine marking was introduced for the Foundation exam, candidates marked up their answers in ink. That meant any last-minute changes remained visible. One person I taught was, once again, very good technically and passed the Foundation exam with high marks. However, he could have scored more than he did. Towards the end of the exam, when going back over questions he’d been a bit unsure of, he altered six of his answers. In every instance, he changed the answer from a correct one to a wrong one.

Taking account of your gut reaction

Sometimes, people just feel that a particular answer is right, or say that their initial gut reaction is that one particular answer is correct. Having studied education and learning, I’m a huge fan of the human brain; it’s incredible. Before the exams, you’ll have studied PRINCE2 intensively, and in that process you’ll have internalised more than you might imagine. When you have a gut reaction, it obviously isn’t your gut at all but your brain. Your subconscious has put things together and flashed to the answer, while your conscious brain is still struggling with the details of the question.

Now please note this carefully: gut reactions can be wrong, so I’m not saying to follow them mindlessly. But if you really don’t know the answer to a question, do consider what your initial reaction was, because surprisingly often it’s right.

Slowing down on negatives

The Foundation exam often includes a number of negative questions. For example, ‘Which one of these is not part of the purpose statement for the Change theme?’ Where the answer options are quite lengthy and need thinking about, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that the question is negative. Three of the four options will actually be correct, because it’s the wrong one you’re looking for. It helps here to slow down, and you might like to underline the word ‘not’ on the question paper if you find during practice that you tend to lose track in this way.

Managing your time

You must manage your time during the Foundation exam so that you don’t time out. In one sense, that’s not difficult, because with 75 questions you have clear milestones to show your progress. In another sense it’s not so easy, because you’re going to find some questions harder than others, and you’ll need more time to deal with them.

During the main part of the exam, don’t get bogged down on a question that you’re finding very difficult. As suggested earlier in this section, if you’re getting really stuck, then it’s better to take a guess at that question, put a big star or question mark against it on the question paper so you can find it again, and move on. If you have some spare time at the end of the exam, you can come back and look at it again. That’s a much better strategy than spending a long time trying to solve what is, to you, an insoluble question, and then not having time to answer the last ten questions in the exam – and so risking failing the whole paper.

Even if you do find yourself short of time and unable to finish the paper, don’t leave any questions out. In the last minute or two of the exam, simply guess the remaining answers – if you’re really pushed for time, that can be without even looking at the question paper. For each guess, you have a 25 per cent chance of hitting the right answer, so for every four guesses at the end of the exam, by rights you should get a mark.

One person I taught some years ago failed the Foundation by one mark. He didn’t answer the last six questions, and said afterwards that he hadn’t had time. So why didn’t he select the ‘a’ option for the last six questions? Surely at least one of them would have been ‘a’, and in that case he would have passed. I gave that example when teaching a course in the Channel Islands some time afterwards. As it happened, someone there also timed out, and again it was the last six questions that she didn’t have time to answer. Remembering my advice, she simply guessed the answers to the six questions. However, she didn’t pick the same letter each time, but rather one at random for each. At the end of the exam she told me what she’d done, and when I came to mark the paper I found that she’d got four out of those six correct. I told her that if she was that fortunate, she should have spent 5 minutes answering the whole paper like that and gone for an extended tea break for the remaining 55 minutes of the exam!

If you can, though, before you resort to outright guesses on unanswered questions, scan through to see whether there are any that you find easy and where you know the right answer immediately. In other words, if you’re facing a time out, your trigger point for emergency action should be about five minutes from the end of the exam.

Finding more than one correct answer

There should only be one right answer to each question, but occasionally a question slips through where more than one answer is correct. Such a situation is not intentional, though, and those setting the question didn’t appreciate that there was a problem.

If you do find two correct answers, then often while one isn’t exactly wrong, another is clearly right. Or, of the two answers, you can see that one is better than the other.

Cat – dog – rabbit

Which animal is listed to the left of rabbit, is it cat or dog? You may answer ‘both of them’, but if you did then you’re wrong and you didn’t read the question. The question said cat or dog. So the answer is dog. Both of the other animals are to the left of rabbit, but dog is immediately to the left of it and so is a better answer than cat. So, in the exam, if you get two answers that seem to be right for a particular question, which is the most ‘right’? You may think even now that cat is a better answer, because cat is further to the left than dog; if so, you’ve hit on another problem, which is where your view doesn’t quite coincide with that of the person who set the question. Actually, that second problem tends to be more of an issue in the Practitioner exam, where a question can include an element of judgement on applying the method to a project. In cases like this, just go with the answer that you think is the best or the most ‘right’.