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Passed CISSP 1st Attempt

ryangmclaughlinryangmclaughlin Member Posts: 7 ■□□□□□□□□□
Big thanks to all the contributors to this forum, it was instrumental in helping to decide study material and study plans. reciprocally I would like to layout my plans and suggestions for future candidates.

TimeFrame:

I gave my self 8 weeks to prepare for this exam, I worked my way up from 1 hour a day to the last week taking off work and hitting it hard.

Study Material:
AIO 6th edition
CCCURE (paid edition)
ISC2 IOS app (bought all CISSP practice exams)
CISSP for dummies IOS APP
Sunflower PDF

Study Approach:
Took an initial exam 250 questions on cccure to see where I was at, then from weakest domain to strongest read the AIO 6th edition section, than re-tested until I was hitting in the 90% range. the day before the exam and the morning of I read the sunflower PDF cover to cover.

Exam Approach:
I decided I would mark questions I wasnt sure of and take a break at the halfway mark. at the end I only used 2.5 of the 6 hours you get for this exam. I did get up early and eat breakfast and a Monster (Which seemed to help me).

Thoughts on exam:
I did not think the exam was incredibly tough, as mentioned in other post the questions are not as technically specific as you will find in most practice tests, they really try to test your ability to relate security issues with security controls/technologies. I also did not find the questions to be as poorly written as some in this forum would say, I did find them unnecessarily wordy however.

Tips on Exam:

1) Read question twice, there will be many right answers, but the question will dictate which is right, for example, the question may talk about implementing cryptography, and mention data integrity, which could/should lead you to answering a hashing algorithm (MD5, SHA-1)

2) Watch out for too much data on questions, unnecessary facts are in the questions (this goes for most exams I guess)

3) Memorizing deep technical specifications wont help as much as understanding security relationships, like knowing if person A encrypts a message with persons b public key, they are concerned with? (confidentiality)

That is all :) W00T!

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