Took the GSEC exam today and passed with exactly 90%
The whole exam I hovered around 85-88% and then once I hit question 150, my score jumped up to 90% so I decided I'd go for it. At question 165, I dropped to 89% so for the last 15 questions I took about an hour and carefully researched each one. The final question was something insanely obscure.. I still don't think it was in the book lol, I took about 20 mins and combed through my materials, but I couldn't find it and ended up guessing. Guessed wrong, but I still ended up with a 90% so I'm pretty satisfied with that. What exactly is the advisory board anyways?
Here was my experience:
1. I took both practice exams in about 2.5 hours each, scoring 80% both times, mostly because I'm impatient and it was just a practice exam, I just plowed through a lot of the questions.
2. Real exam took me a little over 4 hours - I decided I should carefully research each question, no matter how "easy" it seemed. It was good that I did so because some of the answers I would have selected turned out to be the wrong one.
3. Took a break after question 75, mostly because I had to go to the bathroom
4. I did take the live simulcast SANS401 with Eric Cole almost 4 months ago so I had the book material. My index is 35 pages and I also tagged major key points throughout the book with post it stickies and highlighted
5. There were a handful of questions on the exam that I had absolutely no idea how to answer and my index wasn't complete enough so I could look up the material. In these cases, I just systematically removed answers that were absolutely wrong and then would guess from there.
6. There was 1 question that re-appeared from the practice exam. I didn't think that would happen, it is possible that they worded it differently, but I remember the topic clearly because I got it wrong on the practice exam and made sure I put the right information into my index
7. Like I mentioned, I consulted my books/index for about 90% of the test. This might not be advisable for others, but I'm pretty quick with reference materials and I found everything in a timely fashion.
8. Even though I scored better, I found the real test to be more difficult than the practice exams. My opinion is, the practice exams were more straightforward.. you could flip to a page number and find the answer right there. The real exam, there were a lot more scenario questions - you could flip to the page they were referencing but then you needed to use that information to make a decision or solve the problem, the answer wasn't written in.
Not going to lie, studying for this exam was a pain in the butt since I'm also taking part time MBA classes and had several different projects to work on. I think for next year I may start doing some self study for my CISSP. Probably won't take another SANS/GIAC until 2017/2018 unless my company decides they want to give me another course for next year.
