Hello, all i finally passed the GCIH. after 2 failed attempts and 6 months of hardwork. i finally did it.
I got a 85% passing score. First, i want to say thanks to everybody for helping and with giving advice.
I do see the point of building your own index.
The bottom line is – building an index is a complex way of FORCING you to read all 5 books and getting the information in your head. Copying somebody else's index and only using that will not help.
unless you are a highly experienced IT professional and already know these concepts very deeply and not a novice like me. you will fail!!!
It is very important to review the info, get it into your head.or have a very strong idea of where the answer to a question is in the book is.
For example, I got a question about “
chroot” – and I honestly had no idea of where it was in the book. But pretty much everything else I knew where to find the answer quickly. many answers however were fairly easy.
It is important that everybody studying for the GCIH build their own index.
Also – I made the mistake of putting TOO MUCH INFO into the index and I had to simplify it.
Basic words, ideas, concepts, definitions, tools, words go into the index…abstract concepts and all that belong in notes.
But here is the trick….it is very important…to have a way to remember the info and memorize certain ideas, facts and abstract concepts. And Index (atleast for me) was not enough for that.
I don't have a photographic memory.
When taking the exam yesterday. I hardly referred to my index. In all honesty, I only flipped thru it maybe 3-4 times.
I’m not promoting the use of out-dated exam **** off the internet - because only using that is no way to prepare for this exam. alot of that stuff is out of date, some of it isn't but - the truth is -
i needed something to help my brain store the info.
But only having an index is not enough to pass this exam either in my view for a novice.
I realize that many of you guys who work in the I.T. security industry and maybe have a decent grasp of the concepts discussed in the GCIH.
I think I heard a guy say – that he went into the exam without an index and just skimmed the pages and did well.
I’m a novice to the I.T. industry. I have a Comptia Security + certification, and I just graduated from college with a Bachelors in Information Systems.
But the truth – I’m still learning. And so for many of you, the GCIH is possibly a review session. So basically I thought to myself.
“damn…it would be nice if for each section of each book, there was quiz questions on each aspect of the section and its sub section…”
So while looking at exam **** with a software called “Visual Cert Exam Editor” – I got the idea of creating my own customized quizzes based on each section that i read.
But as you can imagine it took me forever to do this. I must have created atleast over 800 quiz questions broken up into sections . I studied for this exam for 6 months. But part of what took me so long was… Reading thru and understanding everything and then realizing that I needed a more simplified index and to build up my customized quizzes for each section of each book.
below is screenshots of my customized quiz question i developed based on what i read
[ REMOVED IMAGE ]
Also – there is a summary. Of each book online. It’s out of date..but the general overview is good to have.
So – it helped me get thru the practice GCIH.. But even with this idea – there were still some question which forced me to flip thru the books and FIND the answer.
But certain question were faily easy because I had seen similar questions that I developed myself and practice questions off the internet, exam ****, and anywhere I could find and download practice questions and find out where in the book certain question refer to.
So – came in to the test more than ready.
So...if anybody here studying for this - has questions...don't hesitate to PM me.
