Passed CISSP on first attempt

victor58victor58 Member Posts: 25 ■□□□□□□□□□
Hello Everyone,

I am glad to inform everyone that I have passed the CISSP exam on first attempt this past Friday. This will be a long post but I am sure it will help people who have been dedicated on this exam preparation. A brief background about me- I have about 5 years of work experience most of it being in information security. Academically, I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science and an MS in Information Security.

I took the CISSP boot camp with SecureNinja in Jan-2014 mainly because I wanted to take class with Clement Dupuis (one behind cccure.org). I didn't do any preparation and hence the bootcamp wasn't much useful for me. End of Feb was when i started studying, aiming to take the Exam in Oct. Around March this year, I booked the exam for Oct 24. During the last 6-7 months, I studies through numerous books/resources some of which are highlighted below.

1. AIO 6th Shon Harris- Very good for concept building although its hard to read this. Before the exam i tried to read all the summaries at the end of chapter and provided in highlights after every few pages.
2. Eric Conrad 2nd Edition- I started reading this and finished about 8/10 domains. It created a base and confidence to start going through AIO.
3. Eric Conrad 11th Hour- Read it 2-3 times but didn't do it in last few days. I think it lacks enough content.
4. Practice Questions from Shon Harris- Great questions. Focussed on scenario based- exam based on scenarios.
5. Total Tested CD- about 1000 questions- Good questions
6. Cccure paid- Did all questions- about 900. - not much useful as its pure memorization of concepts.
7. Transcender’s CISSP Exam questions - Did all the questions, i think about 1000. Good thing with these are that they provide detailed answers of why a certain option is right and why others are wrong. You can use this for preparation in office even if you havent gone through the book on your own.
8. I bought the shon harris question bank but didn't get time to get through those. I think it is a good resource to train your mind for scenario questions.
9. ISC2 250 questions 3 test exams. I did 2 of them and scored around 75%. I think they are not much useful as you don't get a detailed breakdown of the answers which help the most in your preparation.

I used many other resources but I think everyone have mentioned the resources so i wouldn't bring anything new.
Last 1 month, I was only giving exams/doing questions. Training your mind and maintaining focus for 6 hours is not an easy job. I think I took few 100+ questions exams and then randomly did questions where ever I could find them. I also listened to shon harris mp3 in the initial few months but last couple months i didn't had the drive to listen to her.

The major difference is to think like a "manager" and use the "prudent man" approach for all the questions. Even if you do not have years of experience, if you train your mind to think like a manager, you will be able to ace the exam. For me, that was the biggest challenge. I had several scenario based questions and i think majority of my exam was Telecomm (My weak domain (was getting around 50% in mocks but in actual exam I was able to reason through the questions). We have several seniors here who have iterated this approach in detail. If you are a regular follower of TE, you would be able to find those posts. In the last few weeks, I noticed people mentioning they "enjoyed" the exam. I think that only comes when you are thoroughly prepared and not scared to see any question that you can't reason through. For me, CISSP exam preparation was a scary period as i used to read several folks giving the exam several times. I already had the exam registered for Oct but decided to prepone it (idea was to see the questions and then prepare again and give exam in another month). I took the exam last Friday and thankfully got through. I do agree with few folks here who said they "enjoyed" the exam because I did too. I think out of 250 questions, barely 5-6 questions i had no clue (may be twisted wording and could be from the research bunch questions). At the end of exam, I was pretty confident that I got this and even if i didn't i was motivated that i am coming back in a month. Good thing, that wasn't required. CISSP has been a dream for me since 2007, even before i decided to get into the field. But finally i sacrificed NYC spring and summer to prepare for this exam and glad that it went through well.
I am sure many of you would have questions/doubts/etc so please feel free to post your questions. I'll be happy to share my experience and give the few tips that helped me along the way.
Good luck.

Dave

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