CISSP Exam Experience - passed in May 2015
I intended to post this right after my exam, but I procrastinated. More evidence of that below …
Passed the CISSP on 5/29/15. Was pleasantly surprised to get immediate results, so I guess I procrastinated long enough to miss the psychometric study.
Day of the exam:
- I live 4 hours from a test center so I drove over the day before and basically crammed at the hotel until 10:00 PM then tried to get some decent sleep.
- Arrived early for check-in. Nice lady at Pearson Vue, but no sense of humor when I asked her to stamp my passport. My bad; I should have known they would be all business.
- After the exam they told me that NO ONE has ever taken the CISSP at that test center, and they never heard of a test that went for six hours. Interesting.
Exam experience:
- I took 5.5 hours to complete the exam. This was much longer than any of my practice exams, but the questions were tougher. Also, I definitely wasted time trying to “logic” my way through several of the really weirdo questions … if I did it again I would just take educated guesses. It was not good time management to spend ten minutes on a single question. Multiply that by several questions and you could run out of time. Dumb mistake.
- Flagged 10-15 questions for review at the end. Unnnh, my brain was wasted by then so that did not help. Ended up winging it on those.
- Everyone receives a different mix of questions, but I must have had at least 40 questions that were from the new material (post-4/15/15). Despite being “new”, they were not mind-blowingly difficult or tricky. Just the usual level of tricky.
- Tricky analytical questions: Lots and lots. I had read about these things on many blogs and forums, including techexams.net and thought, “really? They can’t possibly be as bad as people say”. Ha! I don’t know what type of evil overachiever cooks up these questions but they are confusing, full of red herrings, and kill your self-confidence. For me, I threw my CISSP studies out the window and fell back on all the stuff I learned in MBA school. Which was ten years ago but was a pretty good foundation in analytical thinking.
- Some questions appeared to be straightforward and logical, but it’s funny how your mind treats these with suspicion. Like it’s just too good to be true.
Study tools:
- SANS class in July 2014. It was a 6- or 8-week virtual class, you connect at a specific time on the appointed days and you’re in a real class with a real instructor. SANS recommends taking the exam within 5-8 weeks but that didn’t exactly work out for me. Procrastination, aka Life (husband, two kids, job).
- SANS study books and MP3 recordings of the lectures. These were invaluable.
- Eric Conrad book. This is the only book SANS recommends besides their materials. Great book!
- Eric Conrad sample exams (there are two exams with 250 questions each). Scored around 80% on each. These are hosted on a website, can’t recall the url.
- CCCure test bank. Spent five months taking these questions, I think I got up to 5000 questions or more (it tells you how many you have taken when you log in). My first scores were around 75% to 80% but with more studying I got up to 83% to 95%. I spent a lot of quality time researching the topics that I answered incorrectly, which helped my retention. CCCure questions were worded similarly to actual exam questions, although the difficulty is not as high. Helps to get used to reading questions with a lot of distractors and quickly filtering out the fluff.
- Transcender test bank. These questions were different than CCCure and so were complementary, in my experience. Good technical questions, with a nice level of trickiness. Forces you to read the questions carefully and not make silly mistakes. Worked through all their test questions, around 1000, improving my scores from around 70%-75% to 85%-90%.
- Skillset questions. These are free and there are a lot of them, they seem to be very up-to-date and I didn’t get the impression they are refurbished “old” questions from the internet. Minimal explanation but you get what you pay for. Still, a good way to blast through hundreds of questions and reinforce your learning.
- Flash cards. Made my own from various sources and packed them with me everywhere. My fat chunk of index cards were the first things tossed after passing the exam.
- New additions to the CISSP. I read the CCCure guy’s (Clement?) list and listened to a SANS webcast to see what to study. Both sources said do NOT buy a new book, just read the suggested white papers and do some general research on specific topics. Lots of reading but the new topics are quite interesting.
- I studied regularly from August 2014 through October 2014. Then I took a break in November/December (BIG MISTAKE) and resumed studying in January, and really ramped up in March/April/May.
- Sugar free Red Bull. Not sure how many cases of this was consumed, but now I crave it all the time, darn it.
That’s it, hope this is helpful to anyone who is grinding through the mountains of CISSP material in preparation for this demanding exam. - Lisa
