ISACA December 2016 Exam Experience and Results - CISA, CISM, CGEIT, CRISC

It seems to be common in this forum to have a singular thread for discussions about the exam experience and results, as opposed to having many smaller threads.

Please feel free to discuss your exam experience, and to get in on the betting pool as to when the official results are posted.

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This was my first certification - ever (CRISC). I have a good core of academic knowledge (MS: IT), and even attended a 4-month full-time trade school. I should have rec'd my A+, Sec+, CCNA, and Some basic Microsoft certs, but even though I attended that full-time course, I didn't find a lot of value in the entry level certs, so I never actually took the tests. I work as a "risk practitioner", so I have a lot of practical experience that helped.

Since I'm tasked with developing our Enterprise Cybersecurity Risk Management department where I work, I convinced the brass to spring for a 3-day "CRISC Boot Camp." That was the Monday - Wednesday prior to the exam. The only studying I did prior to that was going over a few basic practice exams, and some of the self-assessment questions in the official ISACA CRISC Study guide (provided to me by the same company that did the boot camp).

In the end, I think the "boot camp" was helpful, but having access to many practice exams with an answer key that had explanations for each possible response was most beneficial.

Exam experience itself was more-or-less what I expected it to be. Archaic, in a way. Not very efficient at all. I over prepared by having three hand-sharpened pencils, three mechanical ones... Panicked instinctively when I thought I forgot to leave my phone in the car. Patted my pockets, phone was in the car. Two minutes later, panicked again when I wasn't thinking and instinctively checked my pockets and thought I lost my cell phone... Proctors kept using a monosyllabic pronunciation of "Chrisk" when they mentioned the CRISC exam. Thought that was funny.

Made several passes through the exam. First pass, I answered approx. 65-70% of the questions. Marked those I wanted to take a closer look at. I wanted to get the "easy" ones out of the way first. The practice exams helped a ton. I was able to take many questions, and from the explanations in the practice exams, I was able to go "Ah, I see what you're trying to do here..." to most of those 65=70% of questions. Maybe I just had good practice exams, but they did seem a good indication of what to expect on the official exam, in my opinion. In fact, the official exam seemed to use less "trickery" than the practice exams.

On my second and subsequent passes, I continued narrowing down responses. The responses seemed to follow a pattern of "One or two of these answers are obviously wrong, one is correct, and one is a subset to the correct answer." I was less confident about how I answered some of these questions. I found my multiple-pass method beneficial, as I found that if I didn't recall a concept, I would be able to get a better idea of the concept just because they probably would mention it elsewhere in the exam, which provided me with more context. Example: Q1: What color is Chrisk's car? Q45: Crhisks' green car uses what kind of fuel?

I left with the feeling that I passed, but certainly didn't "Ace" it. Not my best performance, but I was playing the odds. I more-or-less did a cost-benefit-analysis. I didn't study much because I knew I needed only 57% of my answers to be correct, and the "boot camp" allows for me to take it again if I fail the first one.

We'll see in eight weeks!