Passed CISSP yesterday!

goktan · November 2014

Hi,
After a 2.5 months of hard study, I passed the exam at the first try yesterday. A little bit long but here is how I did it;
first I studied AIO cover-to-cover and solved questions after each section. meanwhile I watched CBT nuggets videos. this took almost 1.5 months. In my initial initial plan, I was thinking AIO would be enough and I can start solving problems just afterwards, but when I jumped in cccure questions, I saw some problems has even different language than I understand :S. Then I got that I need to understand different viewpoints and returned back to studying with 11hours and official guide. To be honest, it was interesting to see how sources differ from each other. I think this is where Official book works fine although sometimes what you find in it may be not the best answer.
For last two weeks, I only solved problems and prepared a set of flashcards with topics which I failed to answer in tests. My general score for those tests were around 82-94.

Shon AIO 6th edition -> It worked for me alot. It is pretty good structured and topics are tied very well. It has some story telling which is good for a topic you don't know a lot. but for the topics you know this can be little bit boring. And when you are bored, you tend to overlook details, this was one of my problems! Questions are very good, very near to the original exam.
11hours -> short and focused. I think it is a good reminder book.
ISC Official guide 3rd edition -> I could give up my cissp target if I started to study from this book. It is too hard to follow, sometimes unnecessarily too detailed, sometimes too shallow for important topics. For me, the only importance of it, is to understand ISC's viewpoint on topics. Questions are not well structured, sometimes even answers are contradicting with what is written in passages.
Cram Practice questions -> I was thinking these questions are easy but there were really very similar questions to them on the real exam. I think must to check. Also I've solved cram's 2x250 questions practice on elsevier a week before to real exam.
Total tester -> Questions are for sure good since they also come from Shon, as well as the quiz engine. Main problem is, you cannot have an option like "don't show me the questions I solved" so after 250-300 questions you keep getting very small amount of unique questions (I don't know actually how many unique questions are there but according to advert. it should be over 1000). It has a similar UI with the real exam which is good.
mhproof -> same comment about quality that since they come from Shon, they are good.
and finally,
ccccure -> some questions were really easy and some were really hard which I believe brings a good balance. Lately changed test engine is also good which has a similar environment with original exam, even though it has some technical problems yet (getting your results from 25 question test sometimes literally takes longer than getting the original exam results

)

Eventually, I've solved over 5750 unique questions before the exam but still I was a bit frightened before I take it due to comments about its being confusing. To be honest, most of it was a lot easier and straightforward than I expected. Sure I had my brain burnt while thinking which of the remaining 2 choice is correct for around 80-90 questions but I was thinking all questions would be like them. For instance, 142 comprehensive questions at the end of AIO was way harder than most of the questions I can say.
I did 3 passes during the exam. It took longer than my previous tests. first pass was around 3 hours. Then I got back to marked questions which were around 80-90. I solved them in another 1:45 hours and for the last one hour I went through all questions again where I changed maybe another 3-4 questions. and voila, I got the letter saying I passed it!

Now the next step is endorsement and afterwards I'll move forward with OSCP, which I'm really excited about

Many thanks to all who helped me during this journey.
best,