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
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
Comments
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Archon
Member Posts: 183 ■■■□□□□□□□
Congrats. I have my exam in 2 weeks time so currently revising hard. -
joshmadakor
Member Posts: 495 ■■■■□□□□□□
Congrats on the pass. Yeah, the questions are a real pain...really a weird examWGU B.S. Information Technology (Completed January 2013) -
cyberguypr
Mod Posts: 6,928 Mod
Congrats! Now the people in that testing center idolize you as 'the one guy who took a six hour test'. Well done my friend. -
mjsinhsv
Member Posts: 167
Congrats Lisa. It is indeed a challenging exam.
Great review as well.
Can you tell us where you took the exam where they have never proxied the test? -
YouWill787
Member Posts: 20 ■□□□□□□□□□
Congrats!
Thanks for posting your thoughts with such depth and also your study resources and methodology. I'm sitting for the exam the end of this month and this is great motivation. -
RuleOf3
Member Posts: 14 ■■■□□□□□□□
Pearson VUE in Medford, Oregon is where I took the exam. It's a fair-sized city but not exactly a hub of business or government. The place was at capacity with other exam-takers but they were all gone by noon. When I left at 2:00 PM, the staff said they were closing up and going home. I was definitely surprised they had not heard of CISSP. -
Mike-Mike
Member Posts: 1,860
great review, six hour test sounds brutalCurrently Working On
CWTS, then WireShark -
rev_pt
Member Posts: 5 ■□□□□□□□□□
Extremely Helpful...
Congrats... Is it safe to say it should take 8mths to acquire CISSP? -
RuleOf3
Member Posts: 14 ■■■□□□□□□□
Like so many other things, it depends. 2-3 months should be adequate if you really dedicate yourself to studying. Reading the stories on this website made it clear to me that people spend anywhere from several weeks to 24 months. A wide range. For me, I procrastinated too much and dragged out my studying until my husband said Just Do It.
