CAPM Practice Test
Free Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) exam practice in English, Chinese, and Spanish — project management fundamentals, predictive and agile delivery, and business analysis, with an explanation for every answer.
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Practice questions based on the PMI CAPM Examination Content Outline and standard project-management and business-analysis concepts. CAPM, PMP and PMBOK are marks of the Project Management Institute; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by PMI. PMI sets and periodically revises the exam's length, scoring and eligibility requirements — read the current CAPM handbook and Exam Content Outline on PMI's site before you apply or test.
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About the CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management)
The CAPM is PMI's entry-level project management credential, and it exists for a specific person: someone who wants to prove they understand how projects run before they have years of leading them on a résumé. That is the real difference between it and the PMP. The PMP asks you to document substantial experience leading projects; the CAPM asks you to know the discipline. For a career changer, a recent graduate, a coordinator or an analyst who keeps being handed project work without the title, that inversion matters — it is the credential you can actually reach first. The exam has widened well beyond the plan-driven world it started in: alongside project management fundamentals it now tests predictive delivery, agile frameworks, and a substantial block of business analysis. These practice questions follow that four-domain structure and weight the pools the way the blueprint weights the exam, so you spend your practice time roughly where the questions are.
How to study for the CAPM
Start with the vocabulary, because the CAPM is unusually sensitive to it. A large share of the questions turn on whether you can tell two neighbouring terms apart under mild time pressure: a project against a programme against a portfolio; a process group against a knowledge area; quality against grade; quality assurance against quality control; a risk against an issue; verification against validation; resource levelling against resource smoothing; free float against total float. None of these are hard ideas, but they are easy to half-know, and a distractor is usually the neighbouring term rather than something obviously wrong. Read each explanation in this bank even when you answered correctly — the explanation is where the boundary between the two terms is drawn.
Then deliberately study the delivery approach you do not work in. This is the single most reliable source of avoidable lost marks. If your working life is predictive — construction, manufacturing, anything regulated or contractually fixed — you will find the agile domain full of terms you can define but have never used, and definitions alone do not survive a question that asks what a team should do next. If your working life is agile, the reverse trap waits: baselines, formal change control, the work breakdown structure and the 100 percent rule, procurement contract types and who carries the risk in each. Work through both the predictive and the agile pools here even when one of them feels like territory you already own, and pay attention to the situational questions that ask which approach fits a described project rather than what a term means.
Give the calculation items a dedicated session rather than meeting them cold. There are only a handful of shapes and they repeat: walk a described network and find the longest path through it; compute total and free float and say what slipping a given activity does to the finish date; distinguish crashing from fast tracking and name the risk each one adds; apply a three-point estimate; and read earned value indicators. For earned value in particular, do not memorise formulas as strings — anchor them to a single sentence you actually believe, such as "an index below one means less was earned than was spent or planned, so the project is behind on that dimension." That sentence will reconstruct the interpretation under pressure when a memorised formula will not. Practise these until the arithmetic is boring, because on exam day the scarce resource is attention, not arithmetic ability.
Finally, treat business analysis as a subject in its own right, and practise in your strongest language before switching to English. Business analysis carries real weight on this exam and it has its own logic, distinct from delivery: the discipline of describing a problem without naming a solution, choosing an elicitation technique that fits the situation, classifying a requirement correctly as business, stakeholder, solution, transition or quality, and tracing a requirement in both directions. Read those pools slowly. And because every question here exists in English, Chinese and Spanish, the efficient sequence is to build the concept in whichever language you think fastest in, then re-run the same pool in English so the terminology you meet on exam day is already familiar — the ideas and the English wording are two separate things to learn, and learning them at the same time is what makes people slow.
FAQ
Should I take the CAPM or go straight for the PMP?
In practice the choice is usually made for you by the experience requirement rather than by preference. The PMP requires you to document a substantial history of leading projects; if you cannot yet evidence that, the CAPM is the credential available to you now, and it signals to a hiring manager that you know the vocabulary and the mechanics even though your project hours are still accumulating. If you already lead projects and can document it, most people go straight to the PMP, since it carries more weight in the market. The CAPM is not a prerequisite for the PMP. PMI sets and revises the eligibility criteria for both, so check the current handbook for each before you decide.
How much of the CAPM is agile, and how much is traditional project management?
Both are tested, and neither is optional. The blueprint devotes one domain to predictive, plan-based methodology and a separate, somewhat larger one to agile frameworks, on top of a fundamentals domain that covers concepts common to any approach. The practical consequence is that preparing only in the tradition you happen to work in is the classic way to lose marks: someone from a construction or regulated environment tends to underprepare the agile domain, and someone from a software team tends to underprepare baselines, formal change control and the work breakdown structure. PMI publishes the current domain weights in the Exam Content Outline, and it has revised them before, so read the outline itself rather than relying on any percentage you find quoted elsewhere.
Why does a project management exam include business analysis?
Because a large share of failed projects are not badly run — they are built to the wrong requirements, and no amount of scheduling discipline rescues that. Business analysis is the work that happens before and alongside delivery: establishing what the actual business need is, writing a situation statement that describes the problem rather than jumping to a solution, eliciting requirements deliberately instead of waiting for people to volunteer them, classifying and prioritising what comes back, tracing each requirement through to a test, and then evaluating afterwards whether the promised value actually appeared. On a small project the project professional often does this work personally, which is exactly why the entry-level credential tests it. It is a substantial part of the exam and rewards separate study rather than being absorbed incidentally.
Do I need to do maths on the CAPM?
Yes, but it is arithmetic rather than mathematics, and the question always gives you the numbers you need. Expect to walk a small schedule network described in words and identify the critical path, work out how much float an activity has, decide what happens to the finish date when a particular activity slips, apply a three-point estimate, and interpret earned value indicators — knowing what a cost or schedule performance index above or below one is telling you about the project. None of that requires you to memorise a figure. Our scope, schedule and cost pool is deliberately written so every value a calculation needs appears in the question itself, which is both how the real exam presents these items and the only way a practice bank can promise an answer will still be correct years from now.
Why are there no exam fees, question counts or passing scores on this page?
Deliberately, because those are the facts most likely to be out of date by the time you read them. PMI revises the exam's length, its scoring, its fees and its eligibility rules, and it has restructured the Exam Content Outline itself more than once — a practice site that quotes yesterday's numbers with confidence is worse than one that sends you to the source. The same principle governs the questions: none of them keys an answer to a fee, a score, a domain percentage or an edition-numbered reference to a published guide, because every one of those can move without the underlying project-management concept changing at all. For anything administrative, read PMI's current CAPM handbook and Exam Content Outline directly.