ISSAP Practice Exams - Recommendations?

I'm studying for the ISSAP exam*, hope to take it sometime Q1 of this year.
Can anyone who's passed the exam recommend practice exams - which ones you found helpful, which ones were not?

I did a cursory forum search for ISSAP Practice Exam, but couldn't find another thread for this.

*study guides on my desk at the moment:
1. Official ISC2 Guide to the ISSAP CBK
2. Security Engineering - Ross Anderson
3. Enterprise Security Architecture: A Business Drive Approach

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Comments

hankhill

Hi,
I just passed my ISSAP, I would highly recommend using the official Study guide. I was lucky enough for my company to pay for a boot camp training, which was mediocre at best. If you are a CISSP working in the Security engineering field then you should have no problems passing the course.

beads

Download the PDFs and start reading all of them. Didn't bother with many of the books as it would have taken me half a lifetime to run all that duplicate material down and read it.

Settle on one of the tougher quiz books for review material and look up anything that doesn't immediately come to mind.

Its definitely tougher than the CISSP and took me almost as long to complete as the CISSP.

- beads

steky9

Which PDF's exactly are you refering to Beads?

Also which quiz books did you use?

beads

Candidate bulletin and the "Official CBK". You don't buy the official book for the material contained therein you buy the book for the bibliography. Please quote me on this. I have had this conversation and said the same thing so many times only to have people come back and yell at me that the information in the book had nothing to do with the test itself. Its partially true. The material in the book is pretty light compare to what on the exam. Read WHATS IN THE BIBLIOGRAPHY of materials to prepare for the exam. Cannot stress this point often enough. Its a PITA of an exam and much more difficult than the plain CISSP. In fact I got the updated list of possible task question this morning for the ISSAP. Guess what? I added several probable tasks I felt were missing from the mix bringing the new list closer to 100. Your welcome!

Nice list of downloadable .PDFs there as well. Read those first. Everything else is pretty secondary if its not in your library already. Though I suspect many of those tomes are now available digitally thus cheaper.

Speaking of which. Looks like a nice weekend to hit the book recycle bins again. Maybe recycle some hardware at Best Buy as well. Good point, thanks for the reminder folks!

- b/eads

steky9

CIB for ISSAP doesn't seem to have been updated from 2013 from what I can see

https://www.isc2.org/uploadedfiles/(isc)2_public_content/exam_outlines/issap-cib.pdf

By possible task questions, you mean you've been sent the possible future test questions?. And the downloadable PDF files, by this I'm presuming you mean that are listed in the official book bibliography?.

Pardon the idiot level questions, I'm new around here.

beads

steky9 wrote: »

CIB for ISSAP doesn't seem to have been updated from 2013 from what I can see

https://www.isc2.org/uploadedfiles/(isc)2_public_content/exam_outlines/issap-cib.pdf

By possible task questions, you mean you've been sent the possible future test questions?. And the downloadable PDF files, by this I'm presuming you mean that are listed in the official book bibliography?.

Pardon the idiot level questions, I'm new around here.

That would be the point of sending an update to current concentration holders, yeah. First they ask if there is anything we missed in the battery of tasks, next step is to ask the same group to write new and ingenious possible exam questions for review and CPEs to boot. Clarifying above, listed two solid tasks that should be included in the exam, three that were covered elsewhere in the potential tasks.

Truth is there aren't that many active, in good standing, concentration holders from the past 15 years of the program in the first place to get a really large sample to work with. And face it, there is really no need to go further than the CISSP in the first place. These concentrations never really took off as far as market acceptance or demand are concerned. Perhaps that will change in the future - who knows.

We do this every couple of years, if your counting - odd years with an update on in the third year (2016).

Now, if you'll excuse me I am off to finish the last two crypto questions I half wrote for submission the other day for submission of course.

- b/eads