CISA prelim pass 9/27

lucky0977

I took the CISA today and got a provisional pass page at the end. Didn't get a printout of my results, but I was relieved to see the pass notification.

I used the following material to study.

• ISACA CISA official study guide 27th edition - Spent about 5 1/2 weeks, pacing myself with reading a chapter a week.
  

• ISACA CISA Q&A database - This database gives you an indication of what the test will look like but many of the questions frustrated me because a lot of them appeared to be created in an attempt to confuse you. Did all 1000 questions and I never got over 72% on the practice exams, which got me a little worried for the exam.
  

• cisaexamstudy - Hemang Doshi's material simplifies the major concepts that come from the official study guide. I only watched his ytube videos.

• The exam: I took 3 hrs with four breaks mainly because I drank a lot of coffee and water in the morning. The exam questions seemed to be easier than the Q&A database. The questions were mostly a single sentence in length and very straightforward, meaning they didn't create the questions in an attempt to confuse or make you second guess what they were asking. The answers almost always had two options you could immediately disregard and two options which seemed to answer the question. Roughly 20 questions were super easy where you could answer the question before reading the entire question.

Hope this helps future test takers.

balance

Thanks for the post.

Just finished CISM  and CISA is next on my list.  
Congrats on the Pass.

LievenX

first of all congratulations!!! One doubt, how long did it take you to prepare everything before the exam? 

From your message I deduce that you prepared the exam for several months.
BR,

lucky0977

LievenX said:

first of all congratulations!!! One doubt, how long did it take you to prepare everything before the exam? 

From your message I deduce that you prepared the exam for several months.
BR,

I bought the book in June and kinda procrastinated. Never started reading till after the 4th of July. So the whole month of July was spent reading and I bought the Q&A database in August and it took the whole month to complete all 1000 questions. I never opened the review manual again and instead went to ytube to view the Hemang Doshi vids.

The Q&A database will tell you what areas of the book you should study for on the questions you get wrong but honestly, a lot of the practice questions are worded to confuse you. I had similar questions on the exam on the same subject and the exam questions were worded so much better that there was absolutely no confusion.

imnewbie

How long did you study? After cisa are you going to explore other certification?

lucky0977

imnewbie said:

How long did you study? After cisa are you going to explore other certification?

One domain a week and one month to complete the Q&A database. Overall, it was two and a half months. I try to do one cert a year so will take a little break from studying for now and probably get the materials to study for the CISSP-ISSMP and start up again in January.

imnewbie

Pretty awesome. Which certification you have? Can you provide a scale from easy to hard certification?

lucky0977

imnewbie said:

Pretty awesome. Which certification you have? Can you provide a scale from easy to hard certification?

   Determining the difficulty level more or less depends on your working experience. I feel the Network+ and Security + were the hardest for me but that was because it was at the start of my career. 15 yrs in, the CISSP, CISM and CISA were hard but not as difficult because many of the questions you could answer from experience rather than memorizing facts from a textbook. 

deitz11

Congrats Lucky0977

Thank you for sharing this too, I'm in scheduled for end of Oct exam, hopefully I will have smooth one too.

I relied heavily towards Hemang Doshi material from his website and follow his video so far.
Beside the ISACA Q&A do you have any other source of Q&A Bank to practice?

Cheers

lucky0977

The Q&A are all you need. Hemang has some practice questions as well which were easy compared to the Q&A. Use his flashcards on his website as they helped as well.

deitz11

Wow, so maybe I should level up the Q&A, seems like Hemang Q&A way too easy

lucky0977

If you look at other passed threads here and anywhere else, such as Red**t, you'll see a common theme. Many of them attribute the use of the Q&A database  to helping them pass. Don't use it to memorize questions though as you won't see any questions from the Q&A on the exam. The questions you get wrong indicate weak areas where you should go back to read up on.